To clarify, how are we defining âcapacityâ here? Even assuming economic productivity has something to do with it, it doesnât follow that saving a life in a high-income country increases it. For example, retired and disabled persons generally donât contribute much economic productivity. At the bottom of the economic spectrum in developed countries, many people outside of those categories consume significantly more economic productivity than they produce.
To clarify:
I was thinking that global real gross domestic product could be a decent proxy for global capacity, as it represents global purchasing power.
In my comparison, I was assuming people were saved at the same age (in agreement with GiveWellâs moral weights being a function of age too).
So, since high income countries have higher real GDP per capita by defition, saving a life there would increase capacity more there. I actually have a draft related to this. Update: published!
If one is going to go down this path (which I do not myself support!), I think one has to bite the bullet and emphasize saving the lives of economically productive members of the high-income country (or kids/âyoung adults who one expects to become economically productive).
I am also not so willing to go down this path (so I tend to support animal welfare interventions over ones in global health and development), but I tend to agree one would have to bite that bullet if one did want to use economic output as a proxy for whatever is meant by âcapacityâ.
I think it may be important to draw a theory/âpractice distinction here. It seems completely undeniable in theory (or in terms of what is fundamentally preferable) that instrumental value matters, and so we should prefer that more productive lives be saved (otherwise you are implicitly saying to those who would be helped downstream that they donât matter). But we may not trust real-life agents to exercise good judgment here, or we may worry that the attempts would reinforce harmful biases, and so the mere attempt to optimize here could be expected to do more harm than good.
there are many cases in which instrumental favoritism would seem less appropriate. We do not want emergency room doctors to pass judgment on the social value of their patients before deciding who to save, for example. And there are good utilitarian reasons for this: such judgments are apt to be unreliable, distorted by all sorts of biases regarding privilege and social status, and institutionalizing them could send a harmful stigmatizing message that undermines social solidarity. Realistically, it seems unlikely that the minor instrumental benefits to be gained from such a policy would outweigh these significant harms. So utilitarians may endorse standard rules of medical ethics that disallow medical providers from considering social value in triage or when making medical allocation decisions
But these instrumental reasons to be cautious of over-optimization donât imply that we should completely ignore the fact that saving people has instrumental benefits that saving animals doesnât.
So I disagree that accepting capacity-based arguments for GHD over AW forces one to also optimize for saving productive over unproductive people, in a fine-grained way that many would find offensive. The latter decision-procedure risks extra harms that the former does not. (I think recognition of this fact is precisely why many find the idea offensive.)
Thanks for following up, Jason!
To clarify:
I was thinking that global real gross domestic product could be a decent proxy for global capacity, as it represents global purchasing power.
In my comparison, I was assuming people were saved at the same age (in agreement with GiveWellâs moral weights being a function of age too).
So, since high income countries have higher real GDP per capita by defition, saving a life there would increase capacity more there. I actually have a draft related to this. Update: published!
I am also not so willing to go down this path (so I tend to support animal welfare interventions over ones in global health and development), but I tend to agree one would have to bite that bullet if one did want to use economic output as a proxy for whatever is meant by âcapacityâ.
I think it may be important to draw a theory/âpractice distinction here. It seems completely undeniable in theory (or in terms of what is fundamentally preferable) that instrumental value matters, and so we should prefer that more productive lives be saved (otherwise you are implicitly saying to those who would be helped downstream that they donât matter). But we may not trust real-life agents to exercise good judgment here, or we may worry that the attempts would reinforce harmful biases, and so the mere attempt to optimize here could be expected to do more harm than good.
As explained on utilitarianism.net:
But these instrumental reasons to be cautious of over-optimization donât imply that we should completely ignore the fact that saving people has instrumental benefits that saving animals doesnât.
So I disagree that accepting capacity-based arguments for GHD over AW forces one to also optimize for saving productive over unproductive people, in a fine-grained way that many would find offensive. The latter decision-procedure risks extra harms that the former does not. (I think recognition of this fact is precisely why many find the idea offensive.)