Thanks so much for your answer. I generally think what you’re saying here makes sense, but I wanted to dig into one specific point. You say:
My hunch is that if you’re a totalist, your view on saving lives will probably not be driven by crunching the numbers about fertility but about your speculation on how adding people affects the wellbeing of the population and existential security.
What worries me here is that you don’t need to be a totalist to have these concerns. Even under a TRIA framework, wouldn’t you still care about the population-level wellbeing impacts of any intervention (at least on the portion of the population that exists in both the world where the intervention happens and does not happen)? It feels like a little bit of a selective demand for rigor to say that this makes the total utilitarian calculus intractable, but not that it makes any of the other calculi intractable.
Still, I do recognize that total utilitarianism sometimes leads to galaxy-brained worries about higher-order effects.
What worries me here is that you don’t need to be a totalist to have these concerns.
Right, I should have clarified that the gnarly thing with totalism is considering the effect on all future 14k+ generations and the likelihood they exist, not just the higher-order effects on the presently existing population.
However, I’m not the philosopher, so Michael may disagree with my sketch of the situation.
Pointing out an issue with the links to sheets that are referenced. Remove everything after ”/edit” to make them work (as per below), and the latter one regardless is not publicly accessible:
Regarding the content, as explained in Joel’s comment above the immediate expected replacement effects are not included, and if they were to be you need to ask why stop after the first generation. Is there a legitimate argument however to count the first generation and stop there? Because:
first generation replacement effect is relevant immediately, or at least within the next few years. Second generation is relevant in ~20 years, when the state of the world is much less predictable. Hopefully subjective wellbeing of people in these regions will be noticeably better in 20 years, and any replacement effect/rate might also be noticeably different.
it is similar in immediacy and measurability (I think) to developmental, morbidity and grievance impacts that are included.
Thanks very much for flagging the issues with the spreadsheet links. I believe I’ve fixed them all now but do let me know if you encounter any further issues.
Thanks so much for your answer. I generally think what you’re saying here makes sense, but I wanted to dig into one specific point. You say:
What worries me here is that you don’t need to be a totalist to have these concerns. Even under a TRIA framework, wouldn’t you still care about the population-level wellbeing impacts of any intervention (at least on the portion of the population that exists in both the world where the intervention happens and does not happen)? It feels like a little bit of a selective demand for rigor to say that this makes the total utilitarian calculus intractable, but not that it makes any of the other calculi intractable.
Still, I do recognize that total utilitarianism sometimes leads to galaxy-brained worries about higher-order effects.
Right, I should have clarified that the gnarly thing with totalism is considering the effect on all future 14k+ generations and the likelihood they exist, not just the higher-order effects on the presently existing population.
However, I’m not the philosopher, so Michael may disagree with my sketch of the situation.
Thanks HLI. I really like the post.
Pointing out an issue with the links to sheets that are referenced. Remove everything after ”/edit” to make them work (as per below), and the latter one regardless is not publicly accessible:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NMAU-a1X4vqjodjI6kf8KnUyCJaK9uyNvXWj5VetDZw
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RrBuiPVgL-t8hlr6EqkqABiaqdHMGkpvfeiqiiX49LU
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Regarding the content, as explained in Joel’s comment above the immediate expected replacement effects are not included, and if they were to be you need to ask why stop after the first generation. Is there a legitimate argument however to count the first generation and stop there? Because:
first generation replacement effect is relevant immediately, or at least within the next few years. Second generation is relevant in ~20 years, when the state of the world is much less predictable. Hopefully subjective wellbeing of people in these regions will be noticeably better in 20 years, and any replacement effect/rate might also be noticeably different.
it is similar in immediacy and measurability (I think) to developmental, morbidity and grievance impacts that are included.
Thanks.
Thanks very much for flagging the issues with the spreadsheet links. I believe I’ve fixed them all now but do let me know if you encounter any further issues.
Yep that makes sense to me