(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
(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