Thanks for the post. I agree global health and development interventions can look better than animal welfare ones if one puts a sufficiently low weight on expectedtotalhedonisticutilitarianism. However, I feel like the weight would have to be so low than one could then just as well justify spending an extra 100 M$ on improving the health of people in high income countries over donating to GiveWell´s top charities. Any thoughts on this?
Depending on the allocation method you use, you can still have high credence in expected total hedonistic utilitarianism and get allocations that give some funding to GHD projects. For example, in this parliament, I assigned 50% to total utilitarianism, 37% to total welfarist consequentialism, and 12% to common sense (these were picked semi-randomly for illustration). I set diminishing returns to 0 to make things even less likely to diversify. Some allocation methods (e.g. maximin) give everything to GHD, some diversify (e.g. bargaining, approval), and some (e.g. MEC) give everything to animals.
With respect to your second question, it wouldnât follow that we should give money to causes that benefit the already well-off. Lots of worldviews that favor GHD will also favor projects to benefit the worst off (for various reasons). Whatâs your reason for thinking that they mustnât? For what itâs worth, this comes out in our parliament tool as well. Itâs really hard to get any parliament to favor projects that donât target suffering (like Artists Without Borders).
I agree global health and development interventions can look better than animal welfare ones if one puts a sufficiently low weight on expectedtotalhedonisticutilitarianism.
I meant to say âsufficiently low weight on expected total hedonistic utilitarianism (ETHU) and maximising expected choiceworthiness (MEC)â.
Lots of worldviews that favor GHD will also favor projects to benefit the worst off (for various reasons).
Worldviews which favour helping the worse off will tend to support helping animals with negative lives (like caged hens) over saving human lives in low income countries? These human lives would arguably have to be positive to be worth saving. So people supporting GHD over animal welfare are neither helping the worst off nor maximising welfare, but rather strongly rejecting both ETHU and MEC?
Thanks for the post. I agree global health and development interventions can look better than animal welfare ones if one puts a sufficiently low weight on expected total hedonistic utilitarianism. However, I feel like the weight would have to be so low than one could then just as well justify spending an extra 100 M$ on improving the health of people in high income countries over donating to GiveWell´s top charities. Any thoughts on this?
Depending on the allocation method you use, you can still have high credence in expected total hedonistic utilitarianism and get allocations that give some funding to GHD projects. For example, in this parliament, I assigned 50% to total utilitarianism, 37% to total welfarist consequentialism, and 12% to common sense (these were picked semi-randomly for illustration). I set diminishing returns to 0 to make things even less likely to diversify. Some allocation methods (e.g. maximin) give everything to GHD, some diversify (e.g. bargaining, approval), and some (e.g. MEC) give everything to animals.
With respect to your second question, it wouldnât follow that we should give money to causes that benefit the already well-off. Lots of worldviews that favor GHD will also favor projects to benefit the worst off (for various reasons). Whatâs your reason for thinking that they mustnât? For what itâs worth, this comes out in our parliament tool as well. Itâs really hard to get any parliament to favor projects that donât target suffering (like Artists Without Borders).
Thanks, Hayley.
I meant to say âsufficiently low weight on expected total hedonistic utilitarianism (ETHU) and maximising expected choiceworthiness (MEC)â.
Worldviews which favour helping the worse off will tend to support helping animals with negative lives (like caged hens) over saving human lives in low income countries? These human lives would arguably have to be positive to be worth saving. So people supporting GHD over animal welfare are neither helping the worst off nor maximising welfare, but rather strongly rejecting both ETHU and MEC?