″ 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. Under act C, you cause Afiya to be born and prevent her from getting malaria. This beats act A according to (2), and is not better than act B according to (1). Thus, A = B, B ≥ C, and C > A. But this creates a contradiction: B > A and B = A. ”
This argument appears to assume completeness, but it’s far from clear that those who believe that adding good lives does not make an outcome better should accept completeness. (Broome 2005, “Should We Value Population?”, shows that they should not, provided they accept transitivity and the sort of choice-set independence implicitly assumed here).
I don’t have a particularly good understanding of population ethics and I haven’t read Broome (2005) yet, so I could be off base here. But it seems to me that when GiveWell recommends AMF as a top charity, this requires claiming that AMF is in principle comparable to other charities, which requires completeness (or, at least, completeness over the set of charities being compared).
I could also argue that rejecting completeness seems borderline nonsensical, but that’s more complicated to argue, and I don’t really have anything original to contribute on the subject.
On “A Paradox”:
″ 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. Under act C, you cause Afiya to be born and prevent her from getting malaria. This beats act A according to (2), and is not better than act B according to (1). Thus, A = B, B ≥ C, and C > A. But this creates a contradiction: B > A and B = A. ”
This argument appears to assume completeness, but it’s far from clear that those who believe that adding good lives does not make an outcome better should accept completeness. (Broome 2005, “Should We Value Population?”, shows that they should not, provided they accept transitivity and the sort of choice-set independence implicitly assumed here).
I don’t have a particularly good understanding of population ethics and I haven’t read Broome (2005) yet, so I could be off base here. But it seems to me that when GiveWell recommends AMF as a top charity, this requires claiming that AMF is in principle comparable to other charities, which requires completeness (or, at least, completeness over the set of charities being compared).
I could also argue that rejecting completeness seems borderline nonsensical, but that’s more complicated to argue, and I don’t really have anything original to contribute on the subject.