It’s not clear to me that DALYs or QALYs track hedonistic welfare that well. Although life satisfaction isn’t hedonistic either, QALYs give relatively less weight to mental pain (anxiety and depression) and ability to perform usual activities compared to life satisfaction. Michael Plant also argues in favour of using life satisfaction over QALYs in that post. DALYs are calculated slightly differently, based on the judgements of experts rather than something closer to a random sample from the general population, but they may also have no personal experience living with the conditions.
I think your sensitivity analysis might be broad enough for this to not matter, though, since from that link, the difference seems to be at most a factor of about 3.
On the other hand, there’s the question about whether the kinds of tradeoffs people make between pleasure and suffering, or different levels of suffering or different levels of pleasure for different durations actually track hedonistic value. Often there are too many different factors involved to isolate the hedonistic value (and when they try to, like with the experience machine or wireheading, many people seem to reject hedonism and experientialism outright, so the kinds of tradeoffs people make normally might not refer much to the value of experiences; then again, see this). It seems unlikely that there’s a one-size-fits-all, but maybe the average responses are good enough, or the best we can do.
Thanks for this comment, you raise a number of important points. I agree with everything you’ve written about QALYs and DALYs. We decided to frame this in terms of DALYs for simplicity and familiarity. This was probably just a bit confusing though, especially as we wanted to consider values of well-being (much) less than 0 and, in principle, greater than 1. So maybe a generic unit of hedonistic well-being would have been better. I think you’re right that this doesn’t matter a huge amount because we’re uncertain over many orders of magnitude for other variables, such as the moral weight of chickens.
The trade-off problem is really tricky. I share your scepticism about people’s actual preferences tracking hedonistic value. We just took it for granted that there is a single, privileged way to make such trade-offs but I agree that it’s far from obvious that this is true. I had in mind something like “a given experience has well-being −1 if an idealised agent/an agent with the experiencer’s idealised preferences would be indifferent between non-existence and a life consisting of that experience as well as an experience of well-being 1”. There are a number of problems with this conception, including the issue that there might not be a single idealised set of preferences for these trade-offs, as you suggest. I think we needed to make some kind of assumption like this to get this project off the ground but I’d be really interested to hear thoughts/see future discussion on this topic!
It’s not clear to me that DALYs or QALYs track hedonistic welfare that well. Although life satisfaction isn’t hedonistic either, QALYs give relatively less weight to mental pain (anxiety and depression) and ability to perform usual activities compared to life satisfaction. Michael Plant also argues in favour of using life satisfaction over QALYs in that post. DALYs are calculated slightly differently, based on the judgements of experts rather than something closer to a random sample from the general population, but they may also have no personal experience living with the conditions.
I think your sensitivity analysis might be broad enough for this to not matter, though, since from that link, the difference seems to be at most a factor of about 3.
On the other hand, there’s the question about whether the kinds of tradeoffs people make between pleasure and suffering, or different levels of suffering or different levels of pleasure for different durations actually track hedonistic value. Often there are too many different factors involved to isolate the hedonistic value (and when they try to, like with the experience machine or wireheading, many people seem to reject hedonism and experientialism outright, so the kinds of tradeoffs people make normally might not refer much to the value of experiences; then again, see this). It seems unlikely that there’s a one-size-fits-all, but maybe the average responses are good enough, or the best we can do.
Thanks for this comment, you raise a number of important points. I agree with everything you’ve written about QALYs and DALYs. We decided to frame this in terms of DALYs for simplicity and familiarity. This was probably just a bit confusing though, especially as we wanted to consider values of well-being (much) less than 0 and, in principle, greater than 1. So maybe a generic unit of hedonistic well-being would have been better. I think you’re right that this doesn’t matter a huge amount because we’re uncertain over many orders of magnitude for other variables, such as the moral weight of chickens.
The trade-off problem is really tricky. I share your scepticism about people’s actual preferences tracking hedonistic value. We just took it for granted that there is a single, privileged way to make such trade-offs but I agree that it’s far from obvious that this is true. I had in mind something like “a given experience has well-being −1 if an idealised agent/an agent with the experiencer’s idealised preferences would be indifferent between non-existence and a life consisting of that experience as well as an experience of well-being 1”. There are a number of problems with this conception, including the issue that there might not be a single idealised set of preferences for these trade-offs, as you suggest. I think we needed to make some kind of assumption like this to get this project off the ground but I’d be really interested to hear thoughts/see future discussion on this topic!
Some more discussion of welfare metrics here: Why does EA use QALYs instead of experience sampling?