Thank you very much for the post! I have read some comments (and except for Cynthia’s, mostly incompletely). I want to leave a comment that is meant to be a reply to some comments, but also possibly the post itself:
Some comments in the discussion, and perhaps the post implicitly, seem to treat global health as a point of high certainty — Lewis described it as “the closest to total certainty of positive impact of any areas.” But I think that “certainty” is partly an artefact of where we stop scrutinising. Yes, we have strong evidence that bednets counterfactually avert statistical deaths. But we have much weaker evidence that the counterfactual life thereby preserved is net-positive over its remaining course, and weaker still that it’s more net-positive than the resources spent would have produced elsewhere (even limiting the resources within just humans, or the global health cause). That second layer — the value of the outcome, not the efficacy of the intervention — usually gets carried by unstated assumptions rather than by data. (FWIW, part of the assumptions are philosophical. For instance, there are serious philosophers who think that each extra life year is a net-negative, regardless of people’s preferences. Also, people who have their lives saved might go on to harm other humans, but some EAs and ethicists think we ought not consider this when it comes to saving kids.)
I want to be careful not to overstate this, because there are disanalogies: The human prior is genuinely stronger on the immediate impact level. It also seems that on the secondary or further levels, interventions targeting humans are often even less certain than AW ones. So I’m not claiming the two are equally uncertain.
But the (in)consistency point still bites. If AW has a major evidence problem vis-à-vis whether overall welfare was indeed improved, life-saving human interventions have it too — it just happens that we rarely turn the skepticism in that direction (welfare).
P.S. I’m aware of problems raised by population ethics and the meat-eating problem (it’s a more productive framing than the version you heard), so not a novel observation in general. I’m raising my points narrowly because the comment section (or maybe just Lewis, and David Reinstein, plus the post implicitly?) leans on global health being the secure benchmark, in comparison to AW interventions seeking to improve welfare.
P.P.S. I used Claude 4.8 to help me check whether my points were already made by someone else here, and to help me draft the reply, of which I modified.
I find it somewhat hard to take “but what if it’s good for third world children themselves to die” all that seriously as an objection. I think most anti-natalist philosophers would deny this. Isn’t Benatar’s view that is bad for people to come into existence, but it’s often better for their lives to continue once they have started. In general anti-natalists are not usually utilitarians, classical or negative.
My doubt was on the epistemics, and specifically on the estimation of welfare gain by an intervention.
Re: Benatar’s view. He holds the view that the continuation of a life accrues harm. At the same time, he indeed also holds that it is overall better (or more like, less bad) for people’s lives to continue once they have started, because death is even more significant harm.
I can’t say how many anti-natalists are utilitarians of any sort, or the reverse. I am pretty sure many negative utilitarians think that the continuation of any sentient life is net negative.
Going back to Benatar’s view and applying it to our subject matter. He would likely claim that:
Continuation of the lives of third-world children is a harm in itself, both because of the expected negative welfare, and also for some other non-utilitarian reasons.
Nonetheless, letting them die is still overall bad, because dying is an even greater harm.
Thank you very much for the post! I have read some comments (and except for Cynthia’s, mostly incompletely). I want to leave a comment that is meant to be a reply to some comments, but also possibly the post itself:
Some comments in the discussion, and perhaps the post implicitly, seem to treat global health as a point of high certainty — Lewis described it as “the closest to total certainty of positive impact of any areas.” But I think that “certainty” is partly an artefact of where we stop scrutinising. Yes, we have strong evidence that bednets counterfactually avert statistical deaths. But we have much weaker evidence that the counterfactual life thereby preserved is net-positive over its remaining course, and weaker still that it’s more net-positive than the resources spent would have produced elsewhere (even limiting the resources within just humans, or the global health cause). That second layer — the value of the outcome, not the efficacy of the intervention — usually gets carried by unstated assumptions rather than by data. (FWIW, part of the assumptions are philosophical. For instance, there are serious philosophers who think that each extra life year is a net-negative, regardless of people’s preferences. Also, people who have their lives saved might go on to harm other humans, but some EAs and ethicists think we ought not consider this when it comes to saving kids.)
I want to be careful not to overstate this, because there are disanalogies: The human prior is genuinely stronger on the immediate impact level. It also seems that on the secondary or further levels, interventions targeting humans are often even less certain than AW ones. So I’m not claiming the two are equally uncertain.
But the (in)consistency point still bites. If AW has a major evidence problem vis-à-vis whether overall welfare was indeed improved, life-saving human interventions have it too — it just happens that we rarely turn the skepticism in that direction (welfare).
P.S. I’m aware of problems raised by population ethics and the meat-eating problem (it’s a more productive framing than the version you heard), so not a novel observation in general. I’m raising my points narrowly because the comment section (or maybe just Lewis, and David Reinstein, plus the post implicitly?) leans on global health being the secure benchmark, in comparison to AW interventions seeking to improve welfare.
P.P.S. I used Claude 4.8 to help me check whether my points were already made by someone else here, and to help me draft the reply, of which I modified.
I find it somewhat hard to take “but what if it’s good for third world children themselves to die” all that seriously as an objection. I think most anti-natalist philosophers would deny this. Isn’t Benatar’s view that is bad for people to come into existence, but it’s often better for their lives to continue once they have started. In general anti-natalists are not usually utilitarians, classical or negative.
My doubt was on the epistemics, and specifically on the estimation of welfare gain by an intervention.
Re: Benatar’s view. He holds the view that the continuation of a life accrues harm. At the same time, he indeed also holds that it is overall better (or more like, less bad) for people’s lives to continue once they have started, because death is even more significant harm.
I can’t say how many anti-natalists are utilitarians of any sort, or the reverse. I am pretty sure many negative utilitarians think that the continuation of any sentient life is net negative.
Going back to Benatar’s view and applying it to our subject matter. He would likely claim that:
Continuation of the lives of third-world children is a harm in itself, both because of the expected negative welfare, and also for some other non-utilitarian reasons.
Nonetheless, letting them die is still overall bad, because dying is an even greater harm.