Sorry if my comment was unclear. I donât mean that we should use a different set of weights when looking at different interventions, I mean that we should use different weighting frameworks depending on the types of questions we are trying to ask. If weâre trying to quantify the impacts of different interventions on health outcomes, the post-2010 DALY scale might be reasonable. If weâre trying to quantify the impacts of different interventions on wellbeing, then WELLBYs might be reasonable. If we value improvements in health outcomes independent of their impact on subjective wellbeing, then some type of blended framework (e.g. GiveWellâs moral weighting scheme) might make sense.
Iâll return to the RP Moral Weights Project as an example of what Iâm critiquing (the Moral Weight Project is fantastic in lots of ways, I donât mean to say the whole project is bad because of this one critique). For the project, the authors are trying to develop weights that express animalsâ changes in hedonic wellbeing in terms of human DALYs. But itâs not clear that DALYs are a coherent unit for what theyâre trying to measure. The give trying to âestimate the welfare gain from, say, moving layer hens from cages to a cage-free systemâ as an example of the kind of application theyâre looking at. But locking a human in a cage wouldnât obviously change the number of DALYs gained in the world, at least under the post-2010 definition. For that application, a unit that included subjective wellbeing would make a lot more sense. Thatâs the kind of thing Iâm trying to get at.
But I do agree with you that asking disabled people about their experiences and incorporating those results into whatever weighting scale we use is a very valuable step!
Sorry if my comment was unclear. I donât mean that we should use a different set of weights when looking at different interventions, I mean that we should use different weighting frameworks depending on the types of questions we are trying to ask. If weâre trying to quantify the impacts of different interventions on health outcomes, the post-2010 DALY scale might be reasonable. If weâre trying to quantify the impacts of different interventions on wellbeing, then WELLBYs might be reasonable. If we value improvements in health outcomes independent of their impact on subjective wellbeing, then some type of blended framework (e.g. GiveWellâs moral weighting scheme) might make sense.
Iâll return to the RP Moral Weights Project as an example of what Iâm critiquing (the Moral Weight Project is fantastic in lots of ways, I donât mean to say the whole project is bad because of this one critique). For the project, the authors are trying to develop weights that express animalsâ changes in hedonic wellbeing in terms of human DALYs. But itâs not clear that DALYs are a coherent unit for what theyâre trying to measure. The give trying to âestimate the welfare gain from, say, moving layer hens from cages to a cage-free systemâ as an example of the kind of application theyâre looking at. But locking a human in a cage wouldnât obviously change the number of DALYs gained in the world, at least under the post-2010 definition. For that application, a unit that included subjective wellbeing would make a lot more sense. Thatâs the kind of thing Iâm trying to get at.
But I do agree with you that asking disabled people about their experiences and incorporating those results into whatever weighting scale we use is a very valuable step!