Iâm curious why you think Singer would agree that âthe imperative to save the childâs life wasnât in danger of being swamped by the welfare impact on a very large number of aquatic animals.â The original thought-experiment didnât introduce the possibility of any such trade-off. But if you were to introduce this, Singer is clearly committed to thinking that the reason to save the child (however strong it is in isolation) could be outweighed.
Maybe Iâm misunderstanding what you have in mind, but Iâm not really seeing any principled basis for treating âsaving livesâ as in a completely separate bucket from improving quality of life. (Indeed, the whole point of QALYs as a metric is to put the two on a common scale.)
(As I argue in this paper, itâs a philosophical mistake to treat âsaving livesâ as having fixed and constant value, independently of how much and how good of a life extension it actually constitutes. Thereâs really not any sensible way to value âsaving livesâ over and above the welfare benefit provided to the beneficiary.)
Because as soon as you start thinking the value of saving or not saving life is [solely] instrumental in terms of suffering/âoutput tradeoffs, the basic premise of his argument (childrensâ lives are approximately equal, no matter where they are) collapses. And the rest of Singerâs actions also seem to indicate that he didnât and doesnât believe that saving sentient lives is in danger of being swamped by cost-effective modest suffering reduction for much larger numbers of creatures whose degree of sentience he also values.
The other reason why Iâve picked up there being no quantification of any value to human lives is youâve called your bucket âpure suffering reductionâ, not âimproving quality of lifeâ, so itâs explicitly not framed as a comprehensive measure of welfare benefit to the beneficiary (whose death ceases their suffering). The individual welfare upside to survival is absent from your framing, even if it wasnât from your thinking.
If we look at broader measures like hedonic enjoyment or preference satisfaction, I think its much easier for humans to dominate. Relative similarity of how humans and animals experience pain isnât necessarily matched by how they experience satisfaction.
So any conservative framing for the purpose of worldview diversification and interspecies tradeoffs involves separate âbucketsâ for positive and negative valences (which people are free to combine if they actually are happy with the assumption of hedonic utility and valence symmetry). And yes, Iâd also have a separate bucket for âsaving livesâ, which again people are free to attach no additional weight to, and to selectively include and exclude different sets of creatures from.
This means that somebody can prioritise pain relief for 1000 chickens over pain relief for 1 elderly human, but still pick the human when it comes down to whose live(s) to save, which seems well within the bounds of reasonable belief, and similar to what a number of people whoâve thought very carefully about these issues are actually doing.
Youâre obviously perfectly entitled to argue otherwise, but there being some sort of value to saving lives other than âsuffering reductionâ or âthe output they produceâ is a commonly held view, and the whole point of âworldview diversificationâ is not to defer to a single philosopherâs framing. For the record, I agree that one could make a case for saving human lives being cost-effective purely on future outputs and moonshot potential given a long enough time frame (which I think was the core of your original argument), but I donât think thatâs a âconservativeâ framing, I think itâs quite a niche one. Iâd strongly agree with an argument that flowthrough effects mean GHD isnât only âneartermâ.
Iâm curious why you think Singer would agree that âthe imperative to save the childâs life wasnât in danger of being swamped by the welfare impact on a very large number of aquatic animals.â The original thought-experiment didnât introduce the possibility of any such trade-off. But if you were to introduce this, Singer is clearly committed to thinking that the reason to save the child (however strong it is in isolation) could be outweighed.
Maybe Iâm misunderstanding what you have in mind, but Iâm not really seeing any principled basis for treating âsaving livesâ as in a completely separate bucket from improving quality of life. (Indeed, the whole point of QALYs as a metric is to put the two on a common scale.)
(As I argue in this paper, itâs a philosophical mistake to treat âsaving livesâ as having fixed and constant value, independently of how much and how good of a life extension it actually constitutes. Thereâs really not any sensible way to value âsaving livesâ over and above the welfare benefit provided to the beneficiary.)
Because as soon as you start thinking the value of saving or not saving life is [solely] instrumental in terms of suffering/âoutput tradeoffs, the basic premise of his argument (childrensâ lives are approximately equal, no matter where they are) collapses. And the rest of Singerâs actions also seem to indicate that he didnât and doesnât believe that saving sentient lives is in danger of being swamped by cost-effective modest suffering reduction for much larger numbers of creatures whose degree of sentience he also values.
The other reason why Iâve picked up there being no quantification of any value to human lives is youâve called your bucket âpure suffering reductionâ, not âimproving quality of lifeâ, so itâs explicitly not framed as a comprehensive measure of welfare benefit to the beneficiary (whose death ceases their suffering). The individual welfare upside to survival is absent from your framing, even if it wasnât from your thinking.
If we look at broader measures like hedonic enjoyment or preference satisfaction, I think its much easier for humans to dominate. Relative similarity of how humans and animals experience pain isnât necessarily matched by how they experience satisfaction.
So any conservative framing for the purpose of worldview diversification and interspecies tradeoffs involves separate âbucketsâ for positive and negative valences (which people are free to combine if they actually are happy with the assumption of hedonic utility and valence symmetry). And yes, Iâd also have a separate bucket for âsaving livesâ, which again people are free to attach no additional weight to, and to selectively include and exclude different sets of creatures from.
This means that somebody can prioritise pain relief for 1000 chickens over pain relief for 1 elderly human, but still pick the human when it comes down to whose live(s) to save, which seems well within the bounds of reasonable belief, and similar to what a number of people whoâve thought very carefully about these issues are actually doing.
Youâre obviously perfectly entitled to argue otherwise, but there being some sort of value to saving lives other than âsuffering reductionâ or âthe output they produceâ is a commonly held view, and the whole point of âworldview diversificationâ is not to defer to a single philosopherâs framing. For the record, I agree that one could make a case for saving human lives being cost-effective purely on future outputs and moonshot potential given a long enough time frame (which I think was the core of your original argument), but I donât think thatâs a âconservativeâ framing, I think itâs quite a niche one. Iâd strongly agree with an argument that flowthrough effects mean GHD isnât only âneartermâ.