I think most EAs are either positive or neutral about existence per se, and I think most people who are alive are happy to be, even if they struggle with difficult or painful mental and physical health conditions.
One doesn’t need to be a full Malthusian to think that adding severely impaired/relatively unproductive people to a population with a strong welfare state would counterfactually reduce the number of other people who would exist.
Also I basically don’t believe your claim. I think it has huge selection bias behind it. In the highly developed world in which I live I’ve met many people who seemed unhappy with their lives, and it’s hard to believe the less affluent world (the hypermajority) is better off. I might be wrong, but I don’t think you should treat it as a given that adding a person is a positive even holding all else equal.
We’ve had several decades of research on subjective well-being around the world. The big takeaway is that most people are (surprisingly) happy, even in poor countries, and that almost everybody experiences net positive utility.
The real selection bias is that isolated, alienated, single, childless, careerist, consumerist Westerners imagine that everybody else shares their depression & anxiety.
A note on the “positive utility” bit. I am very uncertain about this. We don’t really know where on subjective wellbeing scales people construe wellbeing to go from positive to negative. My best bet is around 2.5 on a 0 to 10 scale. This would indicate that ~18% of people in SSA or South Asia have lives with negative wellbeing if what we care about is life satisfaction (debatable). For the world, this means 11%, which is similar to McAskill’s guess of 10% in WWOTF.
And insofar as happiness is separate from life satisfaction. It’s very rare for a country, on average, to report being more unhappy than happy.
This is interesting! What is your guess of 2.5/10 based on? I guess this fuzziness makes me feel innately sceptical about such scales—I think one can get well-calibrated at tracking mood or wellbeing with numbers, but I think if you just ask a person who hasn’t done this, I wouldn’t expect Person A’s 5 and Person B’s 5 to be the same.
The guess is based on a recent (unpublished and not sure I can cite) survey that I think did the best job yet at eliciting people’s views on the neutral point in three countries (two LMICs).
I agree it’s a big ask to get people to use the exact same scales. But I find it reassuring that populations who we wouldn’t be surprised as having the best and worst lives tend to rate themselves as having about the best and worst lives that a 0 to 10 scale allows (Afghanis at ~2/10 and Finns at ~8/10.
That’s not to dismiss the concern. I think it’s plausible that there are systematic differences in scale use (non-systematic differences would wash out statistically). Still, I think people self-reporting about their wellbeing is informative enough to find and fix the issues rather than give up.
For those somehow interested in this nerdy aside, for further reading see Kaiser & Oswald (2022) on whether subjective scales behave how we’d expect (they do), Plant (2020) on the comparability of subjective scales, and Kaiser & Vendrik (2022) on how threatened subjective scales are to divergences from the linearity assumption (not terribly).
Full disclosure: I’m a researcher at the Happier Lives Institute, which does cause prioritization research using subjective well-being data, so it’s probably not surprising I’m defending the use of this type of data.
The research I’ve seen has done nothing convincing to control for a) selection people having to be in a sufficiently positive frame of mind to take surveys (what exactly is the inverse selection effect you imagine from Westerners?), b) social desirability bias (being happy is attractive—of course we want to announce it!), or c) the hopeless task of communicating positive valence in a standardised way to different global cultures.
selection people having to be in a sufficiently positive frame of mind to take surveys (what exactly is the inverse selection effect you imagine from Westerners
In the west I think being willing to spend time to fill in a survey in return for $1.00 is probably a negative selection effect. Happy people are too busy being awesome.
Life satisfaction for people with disabilities has been well studied. It is lower than people without disabilities (in most cases), but is not zero.
(A handful of sources to start with: paper on disabled people in Germany that shows happiness recovers after disability, paper on Spanish people with intellectual disabilities shows they are largely satisfied with their lives, the average life satisfaction of people with disabilities in Northern Ireland is 7⁄10, across EU member states it’s between 6.2 and 7 out of ten.)
I’m not sure that adding impaired/unproductive people would counterfactually reduce others—if a person with a disability refrains from having a child, that doesn’t mean that some healthy person elsewhere has an extra child.
Re being happy to be alive, I kind of want to distinguish ‘being unhappy with one’s life’ and ‘being happy to be alive’. I think you can have net-negative wellbeing and broadly think your life sucks, but still not sincerely want to die, or wish you’d never been born. This hunch is mainly based on my own experience: I’ve had times in my life where I think my wellbeing was net-negative, but I still didn’t wish I hadn’t been born. Basically I have a sense that there’s a value to my life that’s not straightforwardly related to my wellbeing.
if a person with a disability refrains from having a child, that doesn’t mean that some healthy person elsewhere has an extra child.
It means there are fewer resources to go around, which fractionally disincentivises ~8 billion people from the expensive act of reproduction.
I think you can have net-negative wellbeing and broadly think your life sucks, but still not sincerely want to die, or wish you’d never been born.
This claim makes strong philosophical assumptions. One could question what it even means to either ‘not wish you’d never been born’ or to ‘not want to die when’ when your wellbeing is negative.
One could also claim on a hedonic view that, whatever it means to want not to die, having net-negative wellbeing is the salient point and in an ideal world you would painlessly stop existing. This sounds controversial for humans, but we do it all the time with our pets: throughout their lives, they will fight for survival if put in a threatening state, but if we think they’re suffering too much we will override their desires and take them for one last visit to the vet.
One could question what it even means to either ‘not wish you’d never been born’ or to ‘not want to die when’ when your wellbeing is negative.
One could also claim on a hedonic view that, whatever it means to want not to die, having net-negative wellbeing is the salient point and in an ideal world you would painlessly stop existing.
Given that the lived experience of some (most?) of the people who live lives full of suffering is different from tha model, this suggests that the model is just wrong.
The idea of modeling people as having a single utility that can be negative and thus make their lives “not worth living” is way too simplistic.
I don’t want to give too much detail on a public forum, but I myself am also an example of how this model fails miserably.
What do you mean ‘the model is wrong’? You seem to be confusing functions (morality) with parameters (epistemics).
The idea of modeling people as having a single utility that can be negative and thus make their lives “not worth living” is way too simplistic.
It’s also necessary if you want your functions to be quantitative. Maybe you don’t, but then the whole edifice of EA becomes extremely hard to justify.
If the phrase “Most people have net-positive utility” is rephrased as “most people don’t actively want to not exist” it sounds totally unsurprising, and not nearly as positive as the original sentence. Moreover, it doesn’t seem to be the definition most utilitarians use: For example, “It’s okay to create people as long as they will have net positive utility” would lose all intuitive support if transformed into “It’s okay to create people as long as they won’t actively want to not exist, even if their lives are filled with suffering”.
I’m inclined to consider it far more counterintuitive to think ‘if this person experiences overall slightly more negative than positive affect, but very much wants to live, and find their life meaningful, and I painlessly murder them in their sleep, then I have done them a favor’, which is what a purely hedonist account of individual well-being implies. (Note that this is about what is good for them, not what you morally ought to do, so standard utilitarian stuff about why actually murdering people will nearly always decrease overall utility across all people is true but irrelevant.)
Also in general I’m happy to treat humans as having substantially higher instrumental worth than animals for the increase to human capital, but the effect on net global utility of adding a seriously mentally ill probably omniverous person to the world seems likely to be quite negative even if you think that person’s welfare is net positive.
One doesn’t need to be a full Malthusian to think that adding severely impaired/relatively unproductive people to a population with a strong welfare state would counterfactually reduce the number of other people who would exist.
Also I basically don’t believe your claim. I think it has huge selection bias behind it. In the highly developed world in which I live I’ve met many people who seemed unhappy with their lives, and it’s hard to believe the less affluent world (the hypermajority) is better off. I might be wrong, but I don’t think you should treat it as a given that adding a person is a positive even holding all else equal.
We’ve had several decades of research on subjective well-being around the world. The big takeaway is that most people are (surprisingly) happy, even in poor countries, and that almost everybody experiences net positive utility.
The real selection bias is that isolated, alienated, single, childless, careerist, consumerist Westerners imagine that everybody else shares their depression & anxiety.
A note on the “positive utility” bit. I am very uncertain about this. We don’t really know where on subjective wellbeing scales people construe wellbeing to go from positive to negative. My best bet is around 2.5 on a 0 to 10 scale. This would indicate that ~18% of people in SSA or South Asia have lives with negative wellbeing if what we care about is life satisfaction (debatable). For the world, this means 11%, which is similar to McAskill’s guess of 10% in WWOTF.
And insofar as happiness is separate from life satisfaction. It’s very rare for a country, on average, to report being more unhappy than happy.
This is interesting! What is your guess of 2.5/10 based on? I guess this fuzziness makes me feel innately sceptical about such scales—I think one can get well-calibrated at tracking mood or wellbeing with numbers, but I think if you just ask a person who hasn’t done this, I wouldn’t expect Person A’s 5 and Person B’s 5 to be the same.
The guess is based on a recent (unpublished and not sure I can cite) survey that I think did the best job yet at eliciting people’s views on the neutral point in three countries (two LMICs).
I agree it’s a big ask to get people to use the exact same scales. But I find it reassuring that populations who we wouldn’t be surprised as having the best and worst lives tend to rate themselves as having about the best and worst lives that a 0 to 10 scale allows (Afghanis at ~2/10 and Finns at ~8/10.
That’s not to dismiss the concern. I think it’s plausible that there are systematic differences in scale use (non-systematic differences would wash out statistically). Still, I think people self-reporting about their wellbeing is informative enough to find and fix the issues rather than give up.
For those somehow interested in this nerdy aside, for further reading see Kaiser & Oswald (2022) on whether subjective scales behave how we’d expect (they do), Plant (2020) on the comparability of subjective scales, and Kaiser & Vendrik (2022) on how threatened subjective scales are to divergences from the linearity assumption (not terribly).
Full disclosure: I’m a researcher at the Happier Lives Institute, which does cause prioritization research using subjective well-being data, so it’s probably not surprising I’m defending the use of this type of data.
The research I’ve seen has done nothing convincing to control for a) selection people having to be in a sufficiently positive frame of mind to take surveys (what exactly is the inverse selection effect you imagine from Westerners?), b) social desirability bias (being happy is attractive—of course we want to announce it!), or c) the hopeless task of communicating positive valence in a standardised way to different global cultures.
In the west I think being willing to spend time to fill in a survey in return for $1.00 is probably a negative selection effect. Happy people are too busy being awesome.
What is “net positive utility”? What is the zero point?
Life satisfaction for people with disabilities has been well studied. It is lower than people without disabilities (in most cases), but is not zero.
(A handful of sources to start with: paper on disabled people in Germany that shows happiness recovers after disability, paper on Spanish people with intellectual disabilities shows they are largely satisfied with their lives, the average life satisfaction of people with disabilities in Northern Ireland is 7⁄10, across EU member states it’s between 6.2 and 7 out of ten.)
This seems like a reiteration of Geoffrey Miller’s comment, so all the discussion there applies.
I’m not sure that adding impaired/unproductive people would counterfactually reduce others—if a person with a disability refrains from having a child, that doesn’t mean that some healthy person elsewhere has an extra child.
Re being happy to be alive, I kind of want to distinguish ‘being unhappy with one’s life’ and ‘being happy to be alive’. I think you can have net-negative wellbeing and broadly think your life sucks, but still not sincerely want to die, or wish you’d never been born. This hunch is mainly based on my own experience: I’ve had times in my life where I think my wellbeing was net-negative, but I still didn’t wish I hadn’t been born. Basically I have a sense that there’s a value to my life that’s not straightforwardly related to my wellbeing.
It means there are fewer resources to go around, which fractionally disincentivises ~8 billion people from the expensive act of reproduction.
This claim makes strong philosophical assumptions. One could question what it even means to either ‘not wish you’d never been born’ or to ‘not want to die when’ when your wellbeing is negative.
One could also claim on a hedonic view that, whatever it means to want not to die, having net-negative wellbeing is the salient point and in an ideal world you would painlessly stop existing. This sounds controversial for humans, but we do it all the time with our pets: throughout their lives, they will fight for survival if put in a threatening state, but if we think they’re suffering too much we will override their desires and take them for one last visit to the vet.
Given that the lived experience of some (most?) of the people who live lives full of suffering is different from tha model, this suggests that the model is just wrong.
The idea of modeling people as having a single utility that can be negative and thus make their lives “not worth living” is way too simplistic.
I don’t want to give too much detail on a public forum, but I myself am also an example of how this model fails miserably.
What do you mean ‘the model is wrong’? You seem to be confusing functions (morality) with parameters (epistemics).
It’s also necessary if you want your functions to be quantitative. Maybe you don’t, but then the whole edifice of EA becomes extremely hard to justify.
If the phrase “Most people have net-positive utility” is rephrased as “most people don’t actively want to not exist” it sounds totally unsurprising, and not nearly as positive as the original sentence. Moreover, it doesn’t seem to be the definition most utilitarians use: For example, “It’s okay to create people as long as they will have net positive utility” would lose all intuitive support if transformed into “It’s okay to create people as long as they won’t actively want to not exist, even if their lives are filled with suffering”.
I’m inclined to consider it far more counterintuitive to think ‘if this person experiences overall slightly more negative than positive affect, but very much wants to live, and find their life meaningful, and I painlessly murder them in their sleep, then I have done them a favor’, which is what a purely hedonist account of individual well-being implies. (Note that this is about what is good for them, not what you morally ought to do, so standard utilitarian stuff about why actually murdering people will nearly always decrease overall utility across all people is true but irrelevant.)
Also in general I’m happy to treat humans as having substantially higher instrumental worth than animals for the increase to human capital, but the effect on net global utility of adding a seriously mentally ill probably omniverous person to the world seems likely to be quite negative even if you think that person’s welfare is net positive.