I think it’s valuable to see all of this in one place, and I appreciate the digging required to piece this together.
A few comments:
The highest neutral point we think is plausible is 5⁄10 on a 0 to 10 wellbeing scale, but we mentioned that some philosophical views would stake a claim to the feasibility of 10⁄10.
The highest value of a year of life we’d consider plausible is 10 WELLBYs a year (LS = 10⁄10 and neutral point = 0), and the lowest as −5 (LS = 0⁄10 and neutral point = 5).
But if we’re only accepting low-income country average LS values (~4/10 in our malaria report), then this would be −1 to 4.
I think you can fill out the missing cells for HLI by taking the average age of death, which for Malaria I is ~2 for under 5′s and ~46 for over 5s. Assuming a life expectancy of 70 (what we’ve assumed previously for malaria deaths), that’d imply a moral weight of under-5s = (70 − 2) *(-1 , 4) or (70 − 45)* (-1, 4).
We haven’t explicitly set out to estimate the wellbeing burden of depression, but this is an interesting question. I haven’t thought too much about whether we can use our estimate of the benefit of treating depression with StrongMinds as an implicitly assigning a wellbeing weight to StrongMinds. I’m not sure this is as straightforward as it may appear.
We are still developing our views on these moral weights, particularly around saving lives. To put it lightly, these are philosophically complex questions. Our present aim is to suggest what one should do, conditional on the moral view one holds. But perhaps surprisingly, this takes considerably more effort than assuming a viewpoint and seeing what follows.
Granted, this has its limits. Our emphasis on subjective wellbeing is itself conditional on the primacy of theories of wellbeing that emphasise subjective states (e.g., hedonism, desire satisfaction).
The highest neutral point we think is plausible is 5⁄10 on a 0 to 10 wellbeing scale, but we mentioned that some philosophical views would stake a claim to the feasibility of 10⁄10.
If you can point me to somewhere on the HLI website I can cite I will update this.
I think you can fill out the missing cells for HLI by taking the average age of death, which for Malaria I is ~2 for under 5′s and ~46 for over 5s. Assuming a life expectancy of 70 (what we’ve assumed previously for malaria deaths), that’d imply a moral weight of under-5s = (70 − 2) *(-1 , 4) or (70 − 45)* (-1, 4).
Will do (I will still be using the same range as before though per my point above about finding somewhere I can cite HLI on using 5 as the maximum neutral point).
The other factor is where to locate the neutral point, the place at which someone has overall zero wellbeing, on a 0-10 life satisfaction scale; we assess that as being at each location between 0⁄10 and 5⁄10.
Or
We might suppose, then, that the neutral point on the life satisfaction scale is somewhere between 0 and 5.
Or you could also note that we estimate the lower bound of the value of saving a life as assuming a neutral point of 5.
Hi Simon,
I think it’s valuable to see all of this in one place, and I appreciate the digging required to piece this together.
A few comments:
The highest neutral point we think is plausible is 5⁄10 on a 0 to 10 wellbeing scale, but we mentioned that some philosophical views would stake a claim to the feasibility of 10⁄10.
The highest value of a year of life we’d consider plausible is 10 WELLBYs a year (LS = 10⁄10 and neutral point = 0), and the lowest as −5 (LS = 0⁄10 and neutral point = 5).
But if we’re only accepting low-income country average LS values (~4/10 in our malaria report), then this would be −1 to 4.
I think you can fill out the missing cells for HLI by taking the average age of death, which for Malaria I is ~2 for under 5′s and ~46 for over 5s. Assuming a life expectancy of 70 (what we’ve assumed previously for malaria deaths), that’d imply a moral weight of under-5s = (70 − 2) * (-1 , 4) or (70 − 45) * (-1, 4).
We haven’t explicitly set out to estimate the wellbeing burden of depression, but this is an interesting question. I haven’t thought too much about whether we can use our estimate of the benefit of treating depression with StrongMinds as an implicitly assigning a wellbeing weight to StrongMinds. I’m not sure this is as straightforward as it may appear.
We are still developing our views on these moral weights, particularly around saving lives. To put it lightly, these are philosophically complex questions. Our present aim is to suggest what one should do, conditional on the moral view one holds. But perhaps surprisingly, this takes considerably more effort than assuming a viewpoint and seeing what follows.
Granted, this has its limits. Our emphasis on subjective wellbeing is itself conditional on the primacy of theories of wellbeing that emphasise subjective states (e.g., hedonism, desire satisfaction).
If you can point me to somewhere on the HLI website I can cite I will update this.
Will do (I will still be using the same range as before though per my point above about finding somewhere I can cite HLI on using 5 as the maximum neutral point).
Sure,
See section 2.2
Or
Or you could also note that we estimate the lower bound of the value of saving a life as assuming a neutral point of 5.
I had seen both of those, but I didn’t read either of them as commitments that HLI thinks that the neutral point is between 0 and 5.