For example, last year when Stanford Effective Altruism was considering making donations to charity, we preferred the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative over AMF because we believed that GiveWell gave too much significance to the “GiveWell view” of population ethics and not enough to the total view.
I’m confused about how the differences between SCI and AMF connect to population ethics. Neither charity seems like it would have obvious effects on the birth rate. Both schistomiasis and malaria do harm through a mix of killing people and lowering their subsequent quality of life, but I guess it’s a different mix and the demographics of the people affected is different? It would help a lot to lay out specifically what those differences are.
Almost all the benefits of SCI come from improving quality of life, which is a good thing under any view of population ethics. The case for AMF being better than SCI requires adopting what I call the GiveWell view of population ethics (unless you believe that the non-life-saving benefits of AMF make it worthwhile, which seems fairly plausible to me).
I’m confused about how the differences between SCI and AMF connect to population ethics. Neither charity seems like it would have obvious effects on the birth rate. Both schistomiasis and malaria do harm through a mix of killing people and lowering their subsequent quality of life, but I guess it’s a different mix and the demographics of the people affected is different? It would help a lot to lay out specifically what those differences are.
Almost all the benefits of SCI come from improving quality of life, which is a good thing under any view of population ethics. The case for AMF being better than SCI requires adopting what I call the GiveWell view of population ethics (unless you believe that the non-life-saving benefits of AMF make it worthwhile, which seems fairly plausible to me).