So your donation of a single kidney is buying a few mediocre years of life, in exchange for taking away a few million dollars of the table from any company developing “the proper way” of doing this.
If this practice would spread, we’d live in blood-land, where no money is left on the table.
This argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Is AMF hurting because by distributing bednets and preventing people from getting malaria, you are reducing the incentive to create a malaria vaccine since it would now be less good to create this vaccine.
I can make a million different versions of this. In a nutshell, yes, helping solve a problem makes it smaller and thus less good can be done by others since the problem is now smaller.
Also, allow me to make a small reversal test. You say there is a small market for kidney organs disincentivizing the capital markets from coming in and investing in solutions. If we could, should we be trying to increase the prevalence of kidney disease to increase the potential size of the market for forming kidneys from the recipient’s own cells so that there is a larger reward pool to motivate investors to solve the problem? After all, there are also positive externalities, since growing kidneys is similar to growing any other organ. So advances in this field could be extrapolated and lead to the curing of many other conditions.
“Just do good” is an easy heuristic up until it runs against “just kill yourself” at which point I think we should actually do the utility calculation beyond the 1st degree effects, yes.
My claim is that we shouldn’t be using utilitarian ethics to judge this and instead do the heuristically obvious things, that’s what EA <sometimes> does.
But those heuristics have boundaries which are usually set at harming self and others.
The reason I make this argument is because self-harm is only justified in a very naive utilitarian framework, I believe a mature framework of ethics avoids it in other ways. And I am making this argument primarily for young naive people (like myself) who might not have that fully developed frame of ethics. Some of which might still be utilitarians.
In other words, I would not do the reverse and I don’t think that the “makes the market less efficient” argument stands up to scrutiny in any sensible framework of ethics. But neither does altruistic kidney donation, so I am trying, to the best of my abilities, to showcase the fallacy in the ethical framework with which readers are likely to operate.
This argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Is AMF hurting because by distributing bednets and preventing people from getting malaria, you are reducing the incentive to create a malaria vaccine since it would now be less good to create this vaccine.
I would potentially make this argument, I think many people would, but not because AMF is hurting the development of a malaria vaccine.
Most countries /w malaria got rid of it and they did it through other means, I’d leave it as an exercise to you for how AMF distributing malaria nets could prevent that from happening.
However, the important bit with AMF distributing malaria nets is that the cost to the individual is low and not permanent, on the whole most people working on the malaria nets projects probably came out of it better off in terms of their potential to engage with the world.
“Just do good” is an easy heuristic up until it runs against “just kill yourself” at which point I think we should actually do the utility calculation beyond the 1st degree effects, yes.
This argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Is AMF hurting because by distributing bednets and preventing people from getting malaria, you are reducing the incentive to create a malaria vaccine since it would now be less good to create this vaccine.
I can make a million different versions of this. In a nutshell, yes, helping solve a problem makes it smaller and thus less good can be done by others since the problem is now smaller.
Also, allow me to make a small reversal test. You say there is a small market for kidney organs disincentivizing the capital markets from coming in and investing in solutions. If we could, should we be trying to increase the prevalence of kidney disease to increase the potential size of the market for forming kidneys from the recipient’s own cells so that there is a larger reward pool to motivate investors to solve the problem? After all, there are also positive externalities, since growing kidneys is similar to growing any other organ. So advances in this field could be extrapolated and lead to the curing of many other conditions.
To quote my other comment:
My claim is that we shouldn’t be using utilitarian ethics to judge this and instead do the heuristically obvious things, that’s what EA <sometimes> does.
But those heuristics have boundaries which are usually set at harming self and others.
The reason I make this argument is because self-harm is only justified in a very naive utilitarian framework, I believe a mature framework of ethics avoids it in other ways. And I am making this argument primarily for young naive people (like myself) who might not have that fully developed frame of ethics. Some of which might still be utilitarians.
In other words, I would not do the reverse and I don’t think that the “makes the market less efficient” argument stands up to scrutiny in any sensible framework of ethics. But neither does altruistic kidney donation, so I am trying, to the best of my abilities, to showcase the fallacy in the ethical framework with which readers are likely to operate.
I would potentially make this argument, I think many people would, but not because AMF is hurting the development of a malaria vaccine.
Most countries /w malaria got rid of it and they did it through other means, I’d leave it as an exercise to you for how AMF distributing malaria nets could prevent that from happening.
However, the important bit with AMF distributing malaria nets is that the cost to the individual is low and not permanent, on the whole most people working on the malaria nets projects probably came out of it better off in terms of their potential to engage with the world.
“Just do good” is an easy heuristic up until it runs against “just kill yourself” at which point I think we should actually do the utility calculation beyond the 1st degree effects, yes.