I authored CEARCHās deep report on hypertension, which informs both our own grantmaking in GHD and Charity Entrepreneurshipās recommendation of salt reduction policy as a promising idea to be incubated. CEARCHās report was cited by the OP Kristof in his post. Kristof says āThe survey was administered to EAs, who were then noted to be disproportionately libertarian due to their high education levels, and their autonomy concerns are discounted on those grounds. The framework ends up treating the strength of someoneās concern about autonomy as a reason to give that concern less weight.ā
(1) To address to Kristofās criticism of CEARCHās methodologyāApplying a discount to the estimate obtained from surveying EAs is necessary because we arenāt concerned with how EAs value freedom of choice, but how the average human values freedom of choice. And because EAs are disproportionately highly-educated relative to the global average, and education correlates with liberal values, that means the valuation of freedom of choice here as elicited from EAs is going to be higher than (and biased above) the global averageāhence necessitating adjustment. To elaborate, Iāll just copy-paste Stubagerās (2008) summary:
āIn this regard, previous analyses (see e.g. Van de Werfhorst and de Graaf 2004) have pointed to the important role played by education as a determinant of authoritarianālibertarian values. The unequivocal finding of these analyses has been that high education groups tend towards the libertarian pole while low education groups tend towards the authoritarian pole. Indeed, this finding seems one of the most resilient results in analyses of this value domain (for older studies, see Nunn, Crockett, and Williams 1978; Hyman and Wright 1979; Lipset 1981; Pascarella and Terenzini 1991)ā
Additionally, even if you controlled for education, EAs are very likely to to be disproportionately high scoring on openness to experience, which is another empirical predictor (if not conceptually linked) to liberalism.
(2) More broadly, on whether we should have an autonomy prior, as opposed to treating it like any other benefit or cost in a CEA: Iām liberal, and have strong libertarian instincts on certain things (e.g. freedom of speech; I donāt even think libel or slander should necessarily be illegal), but Iām highly sceptical of an autonomy priorāthat seems to privilege one value above others, particular life/āhealth, which doesnāt seem defensible to me a priori.
Moreover, people generally prefer life to freedom (they wouldnāt choose the death penalty as a punishment over prison or even modern slavery), and if you go out and talk to people in LMICs, youāll largely find they prioritize the lives and health of their kids and themselves + having a job & escaping poverty over abstract notions of freedom. If you want to centre peopleās preferences, you have to take that into account.
Hi Joel, thank you for the detailed and thoughtful comment!
(1) I agree that the post mischaracterized the report. My apologies for that. Iāve updated the corresponding section to make it clear that the adjustments were made due to the surveyed group being unrepresentative of the interventionās target, not because of circular reasoning.
(2) I agree that autonomy shouldnāt be privileged a priori above life, health, or any other values, but this is the more committed harm reductionist view the post is describing, not defending. What I am arguing for is something like the Nuffield Council on Bioethicsā intervention ladder which takes the least intrusive option as the default and puts a rising burden of justification on each more coercive step. In other words, reaching for coercion should require first showing the less intrusive option wonāt do, rather than letting a large enough health number outweigh the autonomy cost directly.
The justification for this is that case-by-case pricing of autonomy is unusually unreliable in this specific domain, because the people building the models often donāt share the preference being restricted, so thereās a greater bias in one direction. This is consistent with data on acceptability of paternalistic interventions (unaffected people support them more). Externalities may explain a part of that (e.g. second hand smoke), but that wouldnāt apply to basically self-regarding cases like sodium or helmet laws.
Another example with a similar structure is a dishonesty prior. A consequentialist doesnāt re-run the cost-benefit each time theyāre tempted to deceive, not because honesty is privileged for its own sake, but because the case-by-case exceptions are exactly the ones motivated reasoning corrupts. Iām claiming autonomy in this domain is the same kind of case.
Hi Kristof, if the steelman case is that autonomy is valuable and we should be averse to using coercion unless there is strong justification, then I do agree. However, I would add that Iāand many othersāsee public health (i.e. saving lives and preventing unnecessarily disability/āpain) as pretty good justification. Also, in this case, weāre talking about taxation and regulatory interventions; people arenāt banned from e.g. eating salty good or drinking sugary drinks. A key point too is that because our tastes are adaptive, people donāt even notice reduced sodium/āsugar content if done slowly; thereās also empirical evidence of this from studies on reformulation (i.e. the consumer literally doesnāt notice), in which case itās not even clear one has reduced freedom in terms of ābeing able to eat/ādrink food that tastes X to a certain extentā.
Moreover, people generally prefer life to freedom (they wouldnāt choose the death penalty as a punishment over prison or even modern slavery), and if you go out and talk to people in LMICs, youāll largely find they prioritize the lives and health of their kids and themselves + having a job & escaping poverty over abstract notions of freedom. If you want to centre peopleās preferences, you have to take that into account.
I donāt see how this example shows anything. The reason governments have to expend effort enforcing their paternalistic regulations is because these regulations violate the preferences of consumers. Now maybe you think consumer preferences are wrong, but forcibly limiting peopleās abilities to take an option that they prefer is clearly not ācentering peopleās preferencesā, unless you think your methodology is somehow better placed to figure out what peopleās preferences are than their actual choices.
To clarify, centering peopleās preferences here refer to centering their telic desires /ā fundamental moral weights, the implications of which (when used in a CEA to assess various individual actions/āphilanthropic interventions/āgovernment policies) may imply that peopleās actions are irrational or non-maximizing.
I authored CEARCHās deep report on hypertension, which informs both our own grantmaking in GHD and Charity Entrepreneurshipās recommendation of salt reduction policy as a promising idea to be incubated. CEARCHās report was cited by the OP Kristof in his post. Kristof says āThe survey was administered to EAs, who were then noted to be disproportionately libertarian due to their high education levels, and their autonomy concerns are discounted on those grounds. The framework ends up treating the strength of someoneās concern about autonomy as a reason to give that concern less weight.ā
(1) To address to Kristofās criticism of CEARCHās methodologyāApplying a discount to the estimate obtained from surveying EAs is necessary because we arenāt concerned with how EAs value freedom of choice, but how the average human values freedom of choice. And because EAs are disproportionately highly-educated relative to the global average, and education correlates with liberal values, that means the valuation of freedom of choice here as elicited from EAs is going to be higher than (and biased above) the global averageāhence necessitating adjustment. To elaborate, Iāll just copy-paste Stubagerās (2008) summary:
āIn this regard, previous analyses (see e.g. Van de Werfhorst and de Graaf 2004) have pointed to the important role played by education as a determinant of authoritarianālibertarian values. The unequivocal finding of these analyses has been that high education groups tend towards the libertarian pole while low education groups tend towards the authoritarian pole. Indeed, this finding seems one of the most resilient results in analyses of this value domain (for older studies, see Nunn, Crockett, and Williams 1978; Hyman and Wright 1979; Lipset 1981; Pascarella and Terenzini 1991)ā
Additionally, even if you controlled for education, EAs are very likely to to be disproportionately high scoring on openness to experience, which is another empirical predictor (if not conceptually linked) to liberalism.
(2) More broadly, on whether we should have an autonomy prior, as opposed to treating it like any other benefit or cost in a CEA: Iām liberal, and have strong libertarian instincts on certain things (e.g. freedom of speech; I donāt even think libel or slander should necessarily be illegal), but Iām highly sceptical of an autonomy priorāthat seems to privilege one value above others, particular life/āhealth, which doesnāt seem defensible to me a priori.
Moreover, people generally prefer life to freedom (they wouldnāt choose the death penalty as a punishment over prison or even modern slavery), and if you go out and talk to people in LMICs, youāll largely find they prioritize the lives and health of their kids and themselves + having a job & escaping poverty over abstract notions of freedom. If you want to centre peopleās preferences, you have to take that into account.
Hi Joel, thank you for the detailed and thoughtful comment!
(1) I agree that the post mischaracterized the report. My apologies for that. Iāve updated the corresponding section to make it clear that the adjustments were made due to the surveyed group being unrepresentative of the interventionās target, not because of circular reasoning.
(2) I agree that autonomy shouldnāt be privileged a priori above life, health, or any other values, but this is the more committed harm reductionist view the post is describing, not defending. What I am arguing for is something like the Nuffield Council on Bioethicsā intervention ladder which takes the least intrusive option as the default and puts a rising burden of justification on each more coercive step. In other words, reaching for coercion should require first showing the less intrusive option wonāt do, rather than letting a large enough health number outweigh the autonomy cost directly.
The justification for this is that case-by-case pricing of autonomy is unusually unreliable in this specific domain, because the people building the models often donāt share the preference being restricted, so thereās a greater bias in one direction. This is consistent with data on acceptability of paternalistic interventions (unaffected people support them more). Externalities may explain a part of that (e.g. second hand smoke), but that wouldnāt apply to basically self-regarding cases like sodium or helmet laws.
Another example with a similar structure is a dishonesty prior. A consequentialist doesnāt re-run the cost-benefit each time theyāre tempted to deceive, not because honesty is privileged for its own sake, but because the case-by-case exceptions are exactly the ones motivated reasoning corrupts. Iām claiming autonomy in this domain is the same kind of case.
Hi Kristof, if the steelman case is that autonomy is valuable and we should be averse to using coercion unless there is strong justification, then I do agree. However, I would add that Iāand many othersāsee public health (i.e. saving lives and preventing unnecessarily disability/āpain) as pretty good justification. Also, in this case, weāre talking about taxation and regulatory interventions; people arenāt banned from e.g. eating salty good or drinking sugary drinks. A key point too is that because our tastes are adaptive, people donāt even notice reduced sodium/āsugar content if done slowly; thereās also empirical evidence of this from studies on reformulation (i.e. the consumer literally doesnāt notice), in which case itās not even clear one has reduced freedom in terms of ābeing able to eat/ādrink food that tastes X to a certain extentā.
I donāt see how this example shows anything. The reason governments have to expend effort enforcing their paternalistic regulations is because these regulations violate the preferences of consumers. Now maybe you think consumer preferences are wrong, but forcibly limiting peopleās abilities to take an option that they prefer is clearly not ācentering peopleās preferencesā, unless you think your methodology is somehow better placed to figure out what peopleās preferences are than their actual choices.
To clarify, centering peopleās preferences here refer to centering their telic desires /ā fundamental moral weights, the implications of which (when used in a CEA to assess various individual actions/āphilanthropic interventions/āgovernment policies) may imply that peopleās actions are irrational or non-maximizing.