On 1. I agree that the broadness of leaving ‘well-being’ unspecified looks like an advantage, but I think that’s someone illusory. If I ask you “okay, so if you want to help people do better, what do you mean by ‘better’?” then you’ve got to specify an account of well-being unless you want to give a circular answer. If you just say “well, I want to do what’s good for them” that wouldn’t tell me what you meant..
This might seem picky, but depending on you view of well-being you get quite sharply different policy/EA decisions. I’m doing some research on this now and hope to write it up soon.
On 2. I should probably reveal my cards and say i’m a hedonist about well-being. I’m not interested in any intervention which doesn’t make people experience more joy and less suffering. To make the point by contrast, lots of thinks which make people richer do nothing to increase happiness. I’m very happy for other EAs to choose their own accounts of well-being of course. As it happens, lots of EAs seem to be implicit or explicit hedonists too.
Thanks for the comments Tom.
On 1. I agree that the broadness of leaving ‘well-being’ unspecified looks like an advantage, but I think that’s someone illusory. If I ask you “okay, so if you want to help people do better, what do you mean by ‘better’?” then you’ve got to specify an account of well-being unless you want to give a circular answer. If you just say “well, I want to do what’s good for them” that wouldn’t tell me what you meant..
This might seem picky, but depending on you view of well-being you get quite sharply different policy/EA decisions. I’m doing some research on this now and hope to write it up soon.
On 2. I should probably reveal my cards and say i’m a hedonist about well-being. I’m not interested in any intervention which doesn’t make people experience more joy and less suffering. To make the point by contrast, lots of thinks which make people richer do nothing to increase happiness. I’m very happy for other EAs to choose their own accounts of well-being of course. As it happens, lots of EAs seem to be implicit or explicit hedonists too.