I find myself still trying to form a view on how much we can and should outsource our moral reasoning by surveying people in general and beneficiaries in particular. I think this is a tricky question, as there are many technical questions we don’t and probably shouldn’t survey the affected people to decide on the best course of action (i.e., setting interest rates). That being said, I would welcome more work understanding people’s views on these tough philosophical questions. I think this could be a promising line of research[1].
Answering your specific comments.
Yes, this is after correcting the previous error.
I would hesitate to ever put “simple” next to “total utilitarian”! But more seriously, we considered adding this perspective, but we found it difficult to implement and more difficult to communicate. The difficulty with incorporating fertility is when to stop counting. Take the immediate “replacement” effect. Roodman (2014) estimates for every 4 children who die, this leads to between 1 and 2 extra children being born. So if we just stop there, adding fertility in a totalist perspective makes AMF look relatively worse. But why stop there? Why not count the next generation? If we save 4 people, but only 2 are counterfactually created, then there are still 2 people who could have 3 children of their own. So instead of just saving 4 people (which would have been the result in the non-totalist analysis), you’ve actually saved 8! Double the value! But would it make sense to add the generation after that? What about the 4th, 5th or 6th generations? At what point are we just making up numbers? A further issue is that this whole discussion doesn’t incorporate a whole lot of more speculative effects that could potentially swamp the totalists calculus. These are infamously tough problems like: is it better or worse for the rest of the population for more people to exist? AKA is the world under or overpopulated? Does adding new people increase or decrease existential risk? I don’t have good, confident answers to these questions, and I’d be sceptical of anyone who claims to! 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.
But the IDinsight report on this topic (2019) made me think this type of work may be more difficult to do in very low-income settings than I might have hoped.
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.
Hi MHR,
I also wish that these choices need not be made.
I find myself still trying to form a view on how much we can and should outsource our moral reasoning by surveying people in general and beneficiaries in particular. I think this is a tricky question, as there are many technical questions we don’t and probably shouldn’t survey the affected people to decide on the best course of action (i.e., setting interest rates). That being said, I would welcome more work understanding people’s views on these tough philosophical questions. I think this could be a promising line of research[1].
Answering your specific comments.
Yes, this is after correcting the previous error.
I would hesitate to ever put “simple” next to “total utilitarian”! But more seriously, we considered adding this perspective, but we found it difficult to implement and more difficult to communicate. The difficulty with incorporating fertility is when to stop counting. Take the immediate “replacement” effect. Roodman (2014) estimates for every 4 children who die, this leads to between 1 and 2 extra children being born. So if we just stop there, adding fertility in a totalist perspective makes AMF look relatively worse. But why stop there? Why not count the next generation? If we save 4 people, but only 2 are counterfactually created, then there are still 2 people who could have 3 children of their own. So instead of just saving 4 people (which would have been the result in the non-totalist analysis), you’ve actually saved 8! Double the value! But would it make sense to add the generation after that? What about the 4th, 5th or 6th generations? At what point are we just making up numbers? A further issue is that this whole discussion doesn’t incorporate a whole lot of more speculative effects that could potentially swamp the totalists calculus. These are infamously tough problems like: is it better or worse for the rest of the population for more people to exist? AKA is the world under or overpopulated? Does adding new people increase or decrease existential risk? I don’t have good, confident answers to these questions, and I’d be sceptical of anyone who claims to! 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.
But the IDinsight report on this topic (2019) made me think this type of work may be more difficult to do in very low-income settings than I might have hoped.
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
---
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