Interesting post, thanks! Updating somewhat after reading it.
One concern I had about this claim:
When you perform act 1 A, a child (let’s call her Afiya) is born, gets malaria, and dies. Under act B, you cause Afiya not to be born. According to assumption (1), this act is not worse than A. Standard person-affecting view says that it is not wrong to cause someone to exist whose life is net positive, so A is not worse than B.
To me it seems that a child being born and then immediately dying of malaria is net negative for the family of the child, in terms of suffering due to loss of a child, compared to the child not being conceived at all. So from this perspective, B<A. If you think this makes sense to you, how does this affect your calculations?
This was my first thought too. Since malaria is most deadly to young children and pregnant women, I’d want to consider the effects on Celeste, who watches her two-year-old die, and Dayo, who watches his pregnant wife die. As the parent of a toddler, I can say that investing a lot of resources into her and then watching her die doesn’t seem like a net positive, even considering that she has enjoyed much of her two years so far.
While GiveWell’s calculations around malaria are based on the lives saved (not other benefits like preventing illness or benefits to family members of not having their loved ones die), this consideration makes it seem very reasonable to me to consider that preventing deaths of people who are already known and loved is a good thing in itself.
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.
Interesting post, thanks! Updating somewhat after reading it.
One concern I had about this claim:
To me it seems that a child being born and then immediately dying of malaria is net negative for the family of the child, in terms of suffering due to loss of a child, compared to the child not being conceived at all. So from this perspective, B<A. If you think this makes sense to you, how does this affect your calculations?
This was my first thought too. Since malaria is most deadly to young children and pregnant women, I’d want to consider the effects on Celeste, who watches her two-year-old die, and Dayo, who watches his pregnant wife die. As the parent of a toddler, I can say that investing a lot of resources into her and then watching her die doesn’t seem like a net positive, even considering that she has enjoyed much of her two years so far.
While GiveWell’s calculations around malaria are based on the lives saved (not other benefits like preventing illness or benefits to family members of not having their loved ones die), this consideration makes it seem very reasonable to me to consider that preventing deaths of people who are already known and loved is a good thing in itself.
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.