I believe this is the most plausible attempt at a resolution I’ve heard so far. Thanks, Johannes.
Like some other responses I’ve heard, if we accept your proposed view on population ethics, we’d still have to substantially update the common view on the value of AMF. Remember, I’m not saying that YLL’s don’t have value; I’m saying that it’s controversial and probably incoherent to claim that the value of AMF’s lives saved equal the (time-discounted) number of additional life-years lived.
If the importance of YLL’s comes from the suffering of parents, as you suggest, YLL’s will look really different than just one DALY per year of life lost. If we adopt more of a preference-utilitarian view, we end up producing contradictory conclusions in the same scenarios that I discussed in my original essay—you can’t claim that AMF saves 35 DALYs without knowing AMF’s population effects.
They could very well just accept all the inconsistencies Dickens mentions and still just maximize EV according to their own (complex) values.
If you’re inconsistent, you cannot coherently maximize EV. You can only maximize EV if you can apply a unique real-valued EV function over states or actions, and such a function only exists in a consistent system.
(Edit: I no longer endorse negative utilitarianism or suffering-focused ethics.)
Thank you! Cross-posting my reply as well:
If we adopt more of a preference-utilitarian view, we end up producing contradictory conclusions in the same scenarios that I discussed in my original essay—you can’t claim that AMF saves 35 DALYs without knowing AMF’s population effects.
Shouldn’t this be fixed by negative preference utilitarianism? There could be value in not violating the “preference-equivalent” of dying one year earlier, but no value in creating additional “life-year” preferences. A YLL would be equivalent to a violated life-preference, then. You could avert YLLs by not having children, of course, which seems plausible to me (if noone is born, whose preference is violated by dying from Malaria?). Being born and dying from Malaria would be worse than non-existence, so referring to your “Bigger Problem”-scenarios, A < B < C and C = D.
Regarding EV: I agree, there has to be one ranking mapping world-states onto real numbers (or R^n if you drop the continuity-axiom). So you’re right in the sense that the supposed GiveWell-ranking of world-states that you assume doesn’t work out. I still think that there might be a way to make a creative mapping in the real world so that the GiveWell focus on DALYs without regarding population size can be somehow translated into a utility function. Anyway, I would kind of agree that AMF turns out to be less effective than previously thought, both from an SFE and a classical view smile emoticon
Cross-posting my reply:
I believe this is the most plausible attempt at a resolution I’ve heard so far. Thanks, Johannes.
Like some other responses I’ve heard, if we accept your proposed view on population ethics, we’d still have to substantially update the common view on the value of AMF. Remember, I’m not saying that YLL’s don’t have value; I’m saying that it’s controversial and probably incoherent to claim that the value of AMF’s lives saved equal the (time-discounted) number of additional life-years lived.
If the importance of YLL’s comes from the suffering of parents, as you suggest, YLL’s will look really different than just one DALY per year of life lost. If we adopt more of a preference-utilitarian view, we end up producing contradictory conclusions in the same scenarios that I discussed in my original essay—you can’t claim that AMF saves 35 DALYs without knowing AMF’s population effects.
If you’re inconsistent, you cannot coherently maximize EV. You can only maximize EV if you can apply a unique real-valued EV function over states or actions, and such a function only exists in a consistent system.
(Edit: I no longer endorse negative utilitarianism or suffering-focused ethics.)
Thank you! Cross-posting my reply as well:
Shouldn’t this be fixed by negative preference utilitarianism? There could be value in not violating the “preference-equivalent” of dying one year earlier, but no value in creating additional “life-year” preferences. A YLL would be equivalent to a violated life-preference, then. You could avert YLLs by not having children, of course, which seems plausible to me (if noone is born, whose preference is violated by dying from Malaria?). Being born and dying from Malaria would be worse than non-existence, so referring to your “Bigger Problem”-scenarios, A < B < C and C = D.
Regarding EV: I agree, there has to be one ranking mapping world-states onto real numbers (or R^n if you drop the continuity-axiom). So you’re right in the sense that the supposed GiveWell-ranking of world-states that you assume doesn’t work out. I still think that there might be a way to make a creative mapping in the real world so that the GiveWell focus on DALYs without regarding population size can be somehow translated into a utility function. Anyway, I would kind of agree that AMF turns out to be less effective than previously thought, both from an SFE and a classical view smile emoticon