It’s interesting that you say that anti-eugenicists are engaging in a motte and bailey argument, looking to tar less oppressive eugenicist practices with the brush of Nazi oppression. As I was reading through this, I worry that the attempted reclamation of the word ‘eugenics’ - as well as making “eugenicists” unpopular—might contribute to a motte and bailey in the other direction, where the motte is “surely you think it’s reasonable to prevent siblings from having kids” and the bailey is more oppressive or coercie forms of reproductive control.
Like, you start the essay with an example of “eugenics” that most people would agree was reasonable -a German court’s attempt to break up a couple of biological siblings. And then later, you talk about Nazi atrocities like murder and sterilization, which I agree that few modern eugenicists advocate for. But between those, you talk about people with mental illness: how bipolar, schizophrenia and substance abuse tendencies are genetic and often passed down to kids. You point out that people with these conditions often get together with others with the same condition, making their kids extra likely to have the disorder.
This perturbs me: is this, for you, in the reasonable ‘siblings’ camp or the unreasonable ‘Nazi atrocities’ camp? I can think of very mild interventions and very repressive ones, and I don’t think you say what you’d actually recommend here. In general, I love and admire people with mental disorders like this (including bipolar and substance abuse), and I think that reproductive rights are extremely important. I would feel sad if a bipolar friend, e.g., was strongly discouraged or even forcibly prevented from having children due to their condition, or if they were encouraged to seek out non-bipolar partners. I’d be against even mild “eugenicist” interventions aimed at making mentally ill people have fewer children.
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.
“I would feel sad if a bipolar friend, e.g., was strongly discouraged or even forcibly prevented from having children due to their condition, or if they were encouraged to seek out non-bipolar partners.”
I would personally feel much more sad if a child was born with a horrible and debilitating disorder unnecessarily.
People with bipolar tend to have a very low quality of life, lower than most other disabilities, and experience lower functioning and well-being even in the stable phase of the disorder. I’m probably neutral/ lean-positive about existence in general, but I am fairly convinced that bringing someone into the world knowing that they have a very high chance of bipolar disorder is a major moral harm, especially when adoption/ surrogacy/ embryo selection present safer options.
Let’s apply the reversal test to your assertion that you’d be “against even mild “eugenicist” interventions aimed at making mentally ill people have fewer children”. Would you be in favor of an organization that gave drugs to people with mental illness that made them more fertile?
All I’m endorsing in this essay is that interventions should be discussed, not any particular intervention. Personally, I would also be against the government intervening in the reproduction of people who want to have children. At the moment, someone with serious mental illness can have multiple children in foster care, have no desire to have children and still, as an accident of sex, have children they cannot care for who, moreover, are more likely to have inherited their problems. This is the basic idea behind Project Prevention- $300 is likely enough of a nudge that it incentivizes someone to take contraception who already does not want children. $300 is unlikely to convince someone who wants to have a child not to. Moreover, most PP clients choose reversible contraception.
There are countries that subsidize IVF. In the near future it could be possible for the government to subsidize polygenic screening for people with heritable conditions who do not want to pass these conditions down to their children. As I know many people with mental illness who choose not to have children because they don’t want their kids to share their misfortune, this could be an intervention that would help mentally ill people who want to have children have (more) children.
Re the reversal test, I’d be in favour of organizations that generally helped people become more fertile, if they wanted to be? I don’t want people with mental illness to have more children per se—I want them to have the amount of children they want to have.
I think in the case of Project Prevention, the question is muddied in several ways. If a person has lots of children but can’t or doesn’t take care of them, I agree that’s a problem, but it’s not really a eugenics issue (it would also be a problem if they had no mental illness and were just negligent). Conversely, if a drug addict had a lot of children but did take care of them, that’s not obviously an issue to me. And based on the wikipedia page, Project Prevention seems like a good example for why people are concerned about the reclamation of “eugenics”. The founder is quoted as saying “We don’t allow dogs to breed. We spay them. We neuter them. We try to keep them from having unwanted puppies, and yet these women are literally having litters of children”. This is incredibly dehumanizing language and doesn’t give me confidence that this person has drug addicts’ interests at heart! Her reply to criticism about this was that she cared about the children. But to me, the fact that the children may not have a stable home or reliable parent figure seems more important than their genetics.
I’d be in favour of polygenic screening for people with heritable conditions, as this really does seem to enhance parental choice and it comes from a place of compassion rather than stigma.
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.
It’s interesting that you say that anti-eugenicists are engaging in a motte and bailey argument, looking to tar less oppressive eugenicist practices with the brush of Nazi oppression. As I was reading through this, I worry that the attempted reclamation of the word ‘eugenics’ - as well as making “eugenicists” unpopular—might contribute to a motte and bailey in the other direction, where the motte is “surely you think it’s reasonable to prevent siblings from having kids” and the bailey is more oppressive or coercie forms of reproductive control.
Like, you start the essay with an example of “eugenics” that most people would agree was reasonable -a German court’s attempt to break up a couple of biological siblings. And then later, you talk about Nazi atrocities like murder and sterilization, which I agree that few modern eugenicists advocate for. But between those, you talk about people with mental illness: how bipolar, schizophrenia and substance abuse tendencies are genetic and often passed down to kids. You point out that people with these conditions often get together with others with the same condition, making their kids extra likely to have the disorder.
This perturbs me: is this, for you, in the reasonable ‘siblings’ camp or the unreasonable ‘Nazi atrocities’ camp? I can think of very mild interventions and very repressive ones, and I don’t think you say what you’d actually recommend here. In general, I love and admire people with mental disorders like this (including bipolar and substance abuse), and I think that reproductive rights are extremely important. I would feel sad if a bipolar friend, e.g., was strongly discouraged or even forcibly prevented from having children due to their condition, or if they were encouraged to seek out non-bipolar partners. I’d be against even mild “eugenicist” interventions aimed at making mentally ill people have fewer children.
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.
“I would feel sad if a bipolar friend, e.g., was strongly discouraged or even forcibly prevented from having children due to their condition, or if they were encouraged to seek out non-bipolar partners.”
I would personally feel much more sad if a child was born with a horrible and debilitating disorder unnecessarily.
People with bipolar tend to have a very low quality of life, lower than most other disabilities, and experience lower functioning and well-being even in the stable phase of the disorder. I’m probably neutral/ lean-positive about existence in general, but I am fairly convinced that bringing someone into the world knowing that they have a very high chance of bipolar disorder is a major moral harm, especially when adoption/ surrogacy/ embryo selection present safer options.
Let’s apply the reversal test to your assertion that you’d be “against even mild “eugenicist” interventions aimed at making mentally ill people have fewer children”. Would you be in favor of an organization that gave drugs to people with mental illness that made them more fertile?
All I’m endorsing in this essay is that interventions should be discussed, not any particular intervention. Personally, I would also be against the government intervening in the reproduction of people who want to have children. At the moment, someone with serious mental illness can have multiple children in foster care, have no desire to have children and still, as an accident of sex, have children they cannot care for who, moreover, are more likely to have inherited their problems. This is the basic idea behind Project Prevention- $300 is likely enough of a nudge that it incentivizes someone to take contraception who already does not want children. $300 is unlikely to convince someone who wants to have a child not to. Moreover, most PP clients choose reversible contraception.
There are countries that subsidize IVF. In the near future it could be possible for the government to subsidize polygenic screening for people with heritable conditions who do not want to pass these conditions down to their children. As I know many people with mental illness who choose not to have children because they don’t want their kids to share their misfortune, this could be an intervention that would help mentally ill people who want to have children have (more) children.
Re the reversal test, I’d be in favour of organizations that generally helped people become more fertile, if they wanted to be? I don’t want people with mental illness to have more children per se—I want them to have the amount of children they want to have.
I think in the case of Project Prevention, the question is muddied in several ways. If a person has lots of children but can’t or doesn’t take care of them, I agree that’s a problem, but it’s not really a eugenics issue (it would also be a problem if they had no mental illness and were just negligent). Conversely, if a drug addict had a lot of children but did take care of them, that’s not obviously an issue to me. And based on the wikipedia page, Project Prevention seems like a good example for why people are concerned about the reclamation of “eugenics”. The founder is quoted as saying “We don’t allow dogs to breed. We spay them. We neuter them. We try to keep them from having unwanted puppies, and yet these women are literally having litters of children”. This is incredibly dehumanizing language and doesn’t give me confidence that this person has drug addicts’ interests at heart! Her reply to criticism about this was that she cared about the children. But to me, the fact that the children may not have a stable home or reliable parent figure seems more important than their genetics.
I’d be in favour of polygenic screening for people with heritable conditions, as this really does seem to enhance parental choice and it comes from a place of compassion rather than stigma.
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.