Thanks for writing this very detailed analysis. I especially enjoyed the arguments for why we can compare LS scores between people, like the Canadian immigrant study.
The section I found most suprising was the part on Givewell using the Time-Relative Interest Account. I’ve always thought of some kind of egalitarianism as being relatively important to EA—the idea that all people are in some sense equally deserving of happiness/welfair/good outcomes. We might save a young person over an old person, but this is only because by doing this we’re counterfactually saving more life-years.
People[2] are equal — everyone has an equal claim to being happy, healthy, fulfilled and free, whatever their circumstances. All people matter, wherever they live, however rich they are, and whatever their ethnicity, age, gender, ability, religious views, etc. [emphasis added]
But the TRIA explicitly goes against this. It directly weighs a year of health for a 25 year old as being inherently more valuable than a year of health for a 5 year old—or a 50 year old. This seems very perverse. Is it really acceptable to cause a large amount of pain to a child, in order to prevent a smaller amount of pain for an adult? I think the majority of people would not agree with this—if anything people prefer to prioritize the suffering of children over that of adults.
Hello Larks. Glad your found it useful. On equality, it’s going to turn on how you think equality should be understood. If you think we should give equal weight to the ‘time-relative-interest-adjusted’ value of people’s life, you might think it is correct to believing saving a 25-year-old is better for that person than saving a 2-year-old is to that person.
FWIW, intuitions seem quite split on deprivationism vs TRIA about deaths. What people find weird about deprivationism is that there is some sharp point when someone starts to matter. Say someone begins to exist after 90 days after conception. Well, saving someone after 89 days would be morally unimportant, whereas saving them after 91 days would be hugely important. TRIA, by contrast, has a more gradually approach.
It seems to me that TRIA is really stretching the definition of ‘equality’. Could I not equally suggest a Citizenship-Relative-Interest-Account? This would fit well with people’s nationalistic intuitions. Indeed, if we look at the list of things GWWC claimed EAs do not discriminate based on, we could circumvent all of them with cunningly crafted X-Relative-Interest-Accounts.
I agree a moral discontinuity would be very perverse. But it seems there are many better options. For example, a totalist view—that people matter even before they are conceived—avoids this issue, and doesn’t suffer from the various inconsistencies that person-affecting views do. Alternatively, if you thought that we should not value people who don’t exist in any way, conception provides a clear discontinuity in many ways, such that it does not seem like it would be weird if there was a moral value discontinuity there also.
But I think the biggest problem is that, even if you accept TRIA, I suspect that most people’s moral intuitions would produce a very different weighting distribution. Specifically, they would be more averse to causing pain to 5 year olds than adults—especially adult men. If I have time I might look into whether there has been any empirical research on the subject; it could be a useful project.
First, I want to say that I do not endorse TRIA. This post wanted to look at applying the SWB approach given what people’s moral views seem to be, rather than evaluate how good those views are. GiveWell staff and many EAs (implictly) endorse TRIA, hence I discussed it.
FWIW, I don’t think the concern that TRIA ignores equality really hits the mark. If you think what matters is interest, then you weight by the strength of interest, and—adding some further theory—young children don’t seem to have such strong interest in survival as older humans. I think there are deep problems with TRIA, but I don’t think concerns about equality is one of them.
Thanks for writing this very detailed analysis. I especially enjoyed the arguments for why we can compare LS scores between people, like the Canadian immigrant study.
The section I found most suprising was the part on Givewell using the Time-Relative Interest Account. I’ve always thought of some kind of egalitarianism as being relatively important to EA—the idea that all people are in some sense equally deserving of happiness/welfair/good outcomes. We might save a young person over an old person, but this is only because by doing this we’re counterfactually saving more life-years.
For example, here is Giving What We Can:
But the TRIA explicitly goes against this. It directly weighs a year of health for a 25 year old as being inherently more valuable than a year of health for a 5 year old—or a 50 year old. This seems very perverse. Is it really acceptable to cause a large amount of pain to a child, in order to prevent a smaller amount of pain for an adult? I think the majority of people would not agree with this—if anything people prefer to prioritize the suffering of children over that of adults.
Hello Larks. Glad your found it useful. On equality, it’s going to turn on how you think equality should be understood. If you think we should give equal weight to the ‘time-relative-interest-adjusted’ value of people’s life, you might think it is correct to believing saving a 25-year-old is better for that person than saving a 2-year-old is to that person.
FWIW, intuitions seem quite split on deprivationism vs TRIA about deaths. What people find weird about deprivationism is that there is some sharp point when someone starts to matter. Say someone begins to exist after 90 days after conception. Well, saving someone after 89 days would be morally unimportant, whereas saving them after 91 days would be hugely important. TRIA, by contrast, has a more gradually approach.
It seems to me that TRIA is really stretching the definition of ‘equality’. Could I not equally suggest a Citizenship-Relative-Interest-Account? This would fit well with people’s nationalistic intuitions. Indeed, if we look at the list of things GWWC claimed EAs do not discriminate based on, we could circumvent all of them with cunningly crafted X-Relative-Interest-Accounts.
I agree a moral discontinuity would be very perverse. But it seems there are many better options. For example, a totalist view—that people matter even before they are conceived—avoids this issue, and doesn’t suffer from the various inconsistencies that person-affecting views do. Alternatively, if you thought that we should not value people who don’t exist in any way, conception provides a clear discontinuity in many ways, such that it does not seem like it would be weird if there was a moral value discontinuity there also.
But I think the biggest problem is that, even if you accept TRIA, I suspect that most people’s moral intuitions would produce a very different weighting distribution. Specifically, they would be more averse to causing pain to 5 year olds than adults—especially adult men. If I have time I might look into whether there has been any empirical research on the subject; it could be a useful project.
First, I want to say that I do not endorse TRIA. This post wanted to look at applying the SWB approach given what people’s moral views seem to be, rather than evaluate how good those views are. GiveWell staff and many EAs (implictly) endorse TRIA, hence I discussed it.
FWIW, I don’t think the concern that TRIA ignores equality really hits the mark. If you think what matters is interest, then you weight by the strength of interest, and—adding some further theory—young children don’t seem to have such strong interest in survival as older humans. I think there are deep problems with TRIA, but I don’t think concerns about equality is one of them.