In defence of WALYs, and in reply to your specific points:
I don’t share your intuition here. Well-being is what we’re talking about when we say “I’m not sure he’s doing so well at the moment”, or when we say “I want to help people as much as possible”. It’s a general term for how well someone is doing, overall. It’s an advantage, in my eyes, that it’s not committed to any specific account of well-being, for any such account might have its drawbacks.
I worry that, in adopting HALYs, EA would tie its aims to a narrow view of what human well-being and flourishing consists of. This is unnecessary, for EA is just about helping people as much as possible. Even if we were convinced that the only component of well-being was happiness, it would still be an additional claim to the core of EA.
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.
In defence of WALYs, and in reply to your specific points:
I don’t share your intuition here. Well-being is what we’re talking about when we say “I’m not sure he’s doing so well at the moment”, or when we say “I want to help people as much as possible”. It’s a general term for how well someone is doing, overall. It’s an advantage, in my eyes, that it’s not committed to any specific account of well-being, for any such account might have its drawbacks.
I worry that, in adopting HALYs, EA would tie its aims to a narrow view of what human well-being and flourishing consists of. This is unnecessary, for EA is just about helping people as much as possible. Even if we were convinced that the only component of well-being was happiness, it would still be an additional claim to the core of EA.
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.