I don’t agree that you need a separate number for lives lost as for lives saved, but I had always implicitly assumed that ‘lives saved’ was a net calculation.
Interesting! I think the question of whether 1 QALY saved (in expectation) is canceled out by the loss of 1 QALY (in expectation) is a complicated question. I tend to think there’s an asymmetry between how good well-being is & how bad suffering is, though my views on this have oscillated a lot over the years. I’d like GiveWell to keep the tallies separate because I’d prefer to make the moral judgement depending on my current take on this asymmetry, rather than have them default to saying it’s 1:1.
I tend to think there’s an asymmetry between how good well-being is & how bad suffering is
This isn’t relevant if you think GiveWell charities mostly act to prevent suffering. I think this is certainly true for the health stuff, and arguably still plausible for the economic stuff.
This is an important point. People often confuse harm/benefit asymmetries with doing/allowing asymmetries. Wenar’s criticism seems to rest on the latter, not the former. Note that if all indirect harms are counted within the constraint against causing harm, almost all actions would be prohibited. (And on any plausible restriction, e.g. to “direct harms”, it would no longer be true that charities do harm. Wenar’s concerns involve very indirect effects. I think it’s very unlikely that there’s any consistent and plausible way to count these as having disproportionate moral weight. To avoid paralysis, such unintended indirect effects just need to be weighed in aggregate, balancing harms done against harms prevented.)
I don’t think it can be separated neatly. If the person who has died as a result of the charity’s existence is a recipient of a disease reduction intervention, then they may well have died from the disease instead if not for the intervention.
Interesting! I think the question of whether 1 QALY saved (in expectation) is canceled out by the loss of 1 QALY (in expectation) is a complicated question. I tend to think there’s an asymmetry between how good well-being is & how bad suffering is, though my views on this have oscillated a lot over the years. I’d like GiveWell to keep the tallies separate because I’d prefer to make the moral judgement depending on my current take on this asymmetry, rather than have them default to saying it’s 1:1.
This isn’t relevant if you think GiveWell charities mostly act to prevent suffering. I think this is certainly true for the health stuff, and arguably still plausible for the economic stuff.
This is an important point. People often confuse harm/benefit asymmetries with doing/allowing asymmetries. Wenar’s criticism seems to rest on the latter, not the former. Note that if all indirect harms are counted within the constraint against causing harm, almost all actions would be prohibited. (And on any plausible restriction, e.g. to “direct harms”, it would no longer be true that charities do harm. Wenar’s concerns involve very indirect effects. I think it’s very unlikely that there’s any consistent and plausible way to count these as having disproportionate moral weight. To avoid paralysis, such unintended indirect effects just need to be weighed in aggregate, balancing harms done against harms prevented.)
I don’t think it can be separated neatly. If the person who has died as a result of the charity’s existence is a recipient of a disease reduction intervention, then they may well have died from the disease instead if not for the intervention.