“There is not objective source of truth that tells you that for example quality adjusted life years are the best objective measure.”
There’s no objective source of truth telling humans to value what we value; on some level it’s just a brute fact that we have certain values. But given a set of values, some metrics will do better vs. worse at describing the values.
Or in other words: Facts about how much people prefer one thing relative to other things are “subjective” in the weak sense that all psychological facts are subjective: they’re about subjects / minds. But psychology facts aren’t “subjective” in a sense like “there are no facts of the matter about minds”. Minds are just as real a part of the world as chairs, electrons, and zebras.
Consider, for example, a measure that says “a sunburn is 1⁄2 as bad as a migraine” versus one that says “a sunburn is a billion times as bad as a migraine”. We can decompose this into a factual claim about the relative preferences of some group of agents, plus a normative claim that calls the things that group dislikes “bad”.
For practical purposes, the important contribution of welfare metrics isn’t “telling us that the things we dislike are bad”; realists are already happy to run with this, and anti-realists are happy to play along with the basic behavioral take-aways in practice.
Instead, the important contribution is the factual claim about what a group prefers, which is as objective/subjective as any other psych claim. Viewed through that lens, even if neither of the claims above is perfectly accurate, it seems clear that the “1/2 as bad” claim is a lot closer to the psychological truth.
“There is not objective source of truth that tells you that for example quality adjusted life years are the best objective measure.”
There’s no objective source of truth telling humans to value what we value; on some level it’s just a brute fact that we have certain values. But given a set of values, some metrics will do better vs. worse at describing the values.
Or in other words: Facts about how much people prefer one thing relative to other things are “subjective” in the weak sense that all psychological facts are subjective: they’re about subjects / minds. But psychology facts aren’t “subjective” in a sense like “there are no facts of the matter about minds”. Minds are just as real a part of the world as chairs, electrons, and zebras.
Consider, for example, a measure that says “a sunburn is 1⁄2 as bad as a migraine” versus one that says “a sunburn is a billion times as bad as a migraine”. We can decompose this into a factual claim about the relative preferences of some group of agents, plus a normative claim that calls the things that group dislikes “bad”.
For practical purposes, the important contribution of welfare metrics isn’t “telling us that the things we dislike are bad”; realists are already happy to run with this, and anti-realists are happy to play along with the basic behavioral take-aways in practice.
Instead, the important contribution is the factual claim about what a group prefers, which is as objective/subjective as any other psych claim. Viewed through that lens, even if neither of the claims above is perfectly accurate, it seems clear that the “1/2 as bad” claim is a lot closer to the psychological truth.