What do effective altruists think about population ethics? I asked about this on Slate Star Codex, and got the impression that there’s too much disagreement for there to be an Official Position about this. I’m asking again here since I want to know what the general range of opinions on this is. Do you think that the number of future lives should be valued systematically, and if so, what sorts of future lives do you think we should:
Nick Beckstead’s thesis “On the Overwhelming Importance of the Far Future” deals thoroughly with these questions from the perspective of Effective Altruism (albeit within the framework of a Philosophy PhD). See especially chapter 4.
Working through the thought experiments he presents and seeing the different unintuitive consequences of each theory changed my mind: I had strong intuitions that creating extra happy lives had no moral value, but I’m now convinced that doesn’t make sense. I also agree with Ryan that the question becomes less about what is worth adding and what isn’t, and more about what we fundamentally value and whether that will be increased.
This is an argument that I’ve previously made, but I can’t recall ever seeing anyone else ever make it. I wish you hadn’t deleted your account so I could see who you were!
I was too lazy to specify that I was talking about the world as it is.
A couple might have a third (or first, or...) child, or they might not. I can accept that the two possibilities lead to slightly different total or average utilities, but as I said, I am not utilitarian on this point. I think we just allow people to choose how many children they have, and we build the rest of ethics around that.
I’ll write more on this but for now, I’ll just state my beliefs without really explaining why I believe them:
Asking ’how should I feel about adding a life is the wrong kind of question to ask
The right question to ask is ’what is valuable in life, and will this be present in that person’s life
It’s not clear that we have a good concept of identity that persist over time but separate people
We should evaluate actions based on their impact on people’s lives, treating all people equally—present or future (or possibly past, depending on your moral system and philosophy of physics), local or far away, existent or not-yet-existent.
All population ethical systems have some unintuitive consequences. It’s a matter of picking the best. (or formulating a compromise)
If you try to make a bonus or a penalty for each life created, then you get weird results, and it becomes even less intuitive.
To the extent that we take a hard-line utilitarian view, we should judge the creation of lives purely based on the life that is created, without bonuses or penalties.
To me, the decision (freely made) to have children is morally neutral—I am not utilitarian on this topic.
Birth rates usually fall substantially as female education levels rise and women become more empowered generally. I would be happier about the world if countries that currently have high birth rates see those birth rates fall thanks to better education levels etc. The sort of drastic fall in birth rates seen in, e.g., South Korea and Iran, are caused by large society-wide changes, and I don’t think it’s likely that as an outside donor I can do anything to help bring about similar society-wide change in, e.g., Nigeria.
But improved access to contraceptives and family planning information help at least some couples choose to have fewer children, and that is something that I would plausibly donate towards. (I don’t know what sort of cost-per-unwanted-birth-averted figure I’d need to prefer a donation to, say, Marie Stopes over a donation to SCI, but it’s something I would carefully consider if I did see those figures.)
I can’t think of any realistic cases where I would pay for extra people to be born.
For my part, I think that it’s healthy to have some parts of your life which you dedicate to doing what seems morally best, and some which you treat as personal, and that having kids should clearly be treated as personal (i.e. you shouldn’t agonise about whether it’s morally optimal). And I say that as someone who probably doesn’t want kids myself, a position that’s informed but not determined by ethical concerns.
I think that there’s no essential difference between making someone in the future better off and changing who’s born in the future so that those who are born are better off. “Person A with good quality of life vs. Person A with poor quality of life” isn’t very different from ’Person A with good quality of life vs. Person B with poor quality of life”, because it shouldn’t matter whether the two lives are “different people” or not.
Given (1), causing a person with poor quality of life not to be born and independently causing a person with good quality of life to be born combine to give a very good outcome, so at least one of these changes should be very good, since the benefits of independent interventions should be additive. This doesn’t determine the benefit of any individual intervention, though. You could think that it’s not important for more good-quality-of-life people to be born and very important for fewer poor-quality-of-life people to be born, or the reverse, or something in between. I don’t think there’s very strong arguments for which one of those you should choose, but I would personally value future lives fairly highly.
“Pure” population interventions like increasing the availability of contraception or funding infertility treatments are not very cost-effective right now, compared to “indirect” interventions. Preventing fatal diseases increases population, while economic development decreases it, and both of these things have very good non-population effects as well. Your opinion on population ethics might affect your choice between the two, however. I personally favor health interventions since I value future lives relatively highly.
There should be more research on the costs of changing population size—currently, it’s hard to estimate how difficult it is to change population in location X by amount Y.
Effective altruists should think about population ethics more quantitatively. There are lots of statistics available about health, GDP, income inequality, population, etc., but I haven’t seen any discussion of tradeoffs between population and the other metrics (e.g. what % population change, either positive or negative, is required to compensate for a 5% reduction in per capita GDP or a 1 year decrease in life expectancy?). Even if you don’t care about the global population per se, the population size of individual countries is still important! If a country has life expectancy 10 years higher than average, adding one person to that country increases global life expectancy just as much as lengthening one person’s life by 10 years does.
What do effective altruists think about population ethics? I asked about this on Slate Star Codex, and got the impression that there’s too much disagreement for there to be an Official Position about this. I’m asking again here since I want to know what the general range of opinions on this is. Do you think that the number of future lives should be valued systematically, and if so, what sorts of future lives do you think we should:
Pay to add?
Be indifferent to adding?
Pay to prevent adding?
Nick Beckstead’s thesis “On the Overwhelming Importance of the Far Future” deals thoroughly with these questions from the perspective of Effective Altruism (albeit within the framework of a Philosophy PhD). See especially chapter 4.
http://tinyurl.com/BecksteadFuture
Working through the thought experiments he presents and seeing the different unintuitive consequences of each theory changed my mind: I had strong intuitions that creating extra happy lives had no moral value, but I’m now convinced that doesn’t make sense. I also agree with Ryan that the question becomes less about what is worth adding and what isn’t, and more about what we fundamentally value and whether that will be increased.
Reproduction can’t be morally neutral.
Imagine a thought experiment where you have to push exactly one of three buttons:
a—a person is created from thin air and tortured horribly for 1,000 years, then vanishes
b—nothing happens
c—a person is created from thin air and lives in unimaginably intense bliss and subjective freedom for 1,000 years, then vanishes
I can accept someone saying there should be no laws that mandate or ban reproduction for various practical and political reasons.
But I can’t take someone seriously who says it’s morally neutral which button you push in the thought experiment above.
This is an argument that I’ve previously made, but I can’t recall ever seeing anyone else ever make it. I wish you hadn’t deleted your account so I could see who you were!
It was Hedonic_Treader.
I was too lazy to specify that I was talking about the world as it is.
A couple might have a third (or first, or...) child, or they might not. I can accept that the two possibilities lead to slightly different total or average utilities, but as I said, I am not utilitarian on this point. I think we just allow people to choose how many children they have, and we build the rest of ethics around that.
I think in the world as it is, allowing people to choose how many children they have is exactly the utilitarian thing to do.
Of course, there are forms of persuasion other than coercion. Some ideas like liberal eugenics have world-improvement potential imo.
I’ll write more on this but for now, I’ll just state my beliefs without really explaining why I believe them:
Asking ’how should I feel about adding a life is the wrong kind of question to ask
The right question to ask is ’what is valuable in life, and will this be present in that person’s life
It’s not clear that we have a good concept of identity that persist over time but separate people
We should evaluate actions based on their impact on people’s lives, treating all people equally—present or future (or possibly past, depending on your moral system and philosophy of physics), local or far away, existent or not-yet-existent.
All population ethical systems have some unintuitive consequences. It’s a matter of picking the best. (or formulating a compromise)
If you try to make a bonus or a penalty for each life created, then you get weird results, and it becomes even less intuitive.
To the extent that we take a hard-line utilitarian view, we should judge the creation of lives purely based on the life that is created, without bonuses or penalties.
To me, the decision (freely made) to have children is morally neutral—I am not utilitarian on this topic.
Birth rates usually fall substantially as female education levels rise and women become more empowered generally. I would be happier about the world if countries that currently have high birth rates see those birth rates fall thanks to better education levels etc. The sort of drastic fall in birth rates seen in, e.g., South Korea and Iran, are caused by large society-wide changes, and I don’t think it’s likely that as an outside donor I can do anything to help bring about similar society-wide change in, e.g., Nigeria.
But improved access to contraceptives and family planning information help at least some couples choose to have fewer children, and that is something that I would plausibly donate towards. (I don’t know what sort of cost-per-unwanted-birth-averted figure I’d need to prefer a donation to, say, Marie Stopes over a donation to SCI, but it’s something I would carefully consider if I did see those figures.)
I can’t think of any realistic cases where I would pay for extra people to be born.
Bernadette Young wrote a great post on this decision (as made by individual parents) here.
For my part, I think that it’s healthy to have some parts of your life which you dedicate to doing what seems morally best, and some which you treat as personal, and that having kids should clearly be treated as personal (i.e. you shouldn’t agonise about whether it’s morally optimal). And I say that as someone who probably doesn’t want kids myself, a position that’s informed but not determined by ethical concerns.
Here’s my own opinions:
I think that there’s no essential difference between making someone in the future better off and changing who’s born in the future so that those who are born are better off. “Person A with good quality of life vs. Person A with poor quality of life” isn’t very different from ’Person A with good quality of life vs. Person B with poor quality of life”, because it shouldn’t matter whether the two lives are “different people” or not.
Given (1), causing a person with poor quality of life not to be born and independently causing a person with good quality of life to be born combine to give a very good outcome, so at least one of these changes should be very good, since the benefits of independent interventions should be additive. This doesn’t determine the benefit of any individual intervention, though. You could think that it’s not important for more good-quality-of-life people to be born and very important for fewer poor-quality-of-life people to be born, or the reverse, or something in between. I don’t think there’s very strong arguments for which one of those you should choose, but I would personally value future lives fairly highly.
“Pure” population interventions like increasing the availability of contraception or funding infertility treatments are not very cost-effective right now, compared to “indirect” interventions. Preventing fatal diseases increases population, while economic development decreases it, and both of these things have very good non-population effects as well. Your opinion on population ethics might affect your choice between the two, however. I personally favor health interventions since I value future lives relatively highly.
There should be more research on the costs of changing population size—currently, it’s hard to estimate how difficult it is to change population in location X by amount Y.
Effective altruists should think about population ethics more quantitatively. There are lots of statistics available about health, GDP, income inequality, population, etc., but I haven’t seen any discussion of tradeoffs between population and the other metrics (e.g. what % population change, either positive or negative, is required to compensate for a 5% reduction in per capita GDP or a 1 year decrease in life expectancy?). Even if you don’t care about the global population per se, the population size of individual countries is still important! If a country has life expectancy 10 years higher than average, adding one person to that country increases global life expectancy just as much as lengthening one person’s life by 10 years does.
I agree with these.
Is interesting. It’s the sort of thing that I think Robin Hanson or Tyler Cowen might have an opinion on, and one could easily ask them.