In general, people have complex preferences about their giving, so I think it is better to be transparent instead of assuming no one would care about the additional information.
I think GiveWell is sufficiently transparent here—its value proposition is that donating a few thousand dollars will, in expectancy, save the life of a child under five in the developing world. Whether or not this is a good thing is largely left as an exercise to the reader. I do not expect GiveWell to do my moral philosophy homework for me.
I also think it’s fairly obvious that people tend to eat meat and cause carbon emissions, that more children in a heavily resource-constrained country means spreading available resources more thinly across the country’s children, and so on. Because these things are fairly obvious, donors who are concerned about the sign value of the saving-lives output are free to conduct their own research.
If GiveWell dwelled a ton on the upside collateral effects of saving a life—such as harping on the possibility that the life you can save will cure cancer—then I would be more favorably inclined to a view that it was inappropriately selective in its presentation of second-order effects.
I think GiveWell is sufficiently transparent here—its value proposition is that donating a few thousand dollars will, in expectancy, save the life of a child under five in the developing world. Whether or not this is a good thing is largely left as an exercise to the reader. I do not expect GiveWell to do my moral philosophy homework for me.
I also think it’s fairly obvious that people tend to eat meat and cause carbon emissions, that more children in a heavily resource-constrained country means spreading available resources more thinly across the country’s children, and so on. Because these things are fairly obvious, donors who are concerned about the sign value of the saving-lives output are free to conduct their own research.
If GiveWell dwelled a ton on the upside collateral effects of saving a life—such as harping on the possibility that the life you can save will cure cancer—then I would be more favorably inclined to a view that it was inappropriately selective in its presentation of second-order effects.