I agree that this matters, but my argument just considers the effects on the primary individual, not effects on the parents, economic flow-through effects, etc. Similarly, cost-effectiveness calculations for AMF don’t typically include a term for parental suffering.
Even so, the suffering of birth, death and perhaps of being an inarticulate infant can be high enough to make it net-negative for the primary individual. It can even be high enough to outweigh 35 average human life-years if it is severe enough and/or the average experience value of one life-year is low enough or negative.
Even if this isn’t true for the majority, it can still be true for the average, e.g. if 1% of life-years contain unusual suffering 100 times as severe as 1 life-year is good.
Ok, I see how for the sake of your argument of specifically trying to optimize GiveWell rankings, this point may not seem central. Still, this may be part of what you call the “GiveWell view,” consciously or unconsciously—I’d be interested in what GiveWell folks have to say about it.
I agree that this matters, but my argument just considers the effects on the primary individual, not effects on the parents, economic flow-through effects, etc. Similarly, cost-effectiveness calculations for AMF don’t typically include a term for parental suffering.
Even so, the suffering of birth, death and perhaps of being an inarticulate infant can be high enough to make it net-negative for the primary individual. It can even be high enough to outweigh 35 average human life-years if it is severe enough and/or the average experience value of one life-year is low enough or negative.
Even if this isn’t true for the majority, it can still be true for the average, e.g. if 1% of life-years contain unusual suffering 100 times as severe as 1 life-year is good.
Ok, I see how for the sake of your argument of specifically trying to optimize GiveWell rankings, this point may not seem central. Still, this may be part of what you call the “GiveWell view,” consciously or unconsciously—I’d be interested in what GiveWell folks have to say about it.