I don’t agree with the response suggested (recognising that it cites an article I co-authored). The DALY and QALY metrics imply the ARC. It seems reasonable that these metrics or ones similar are in some sense definitive of EA in global poverty and health.
Then the question is whether it is correct to aggregate small benefits. It’s fair to say there is philosophical disagreement about this, but nevertheless (in my view) a strong case to be made that the fully aggregative view is correct. One way to approach this, probably the dominant way in moral philosophy, is to figure out the implications of philosophical views and then to choose between the various counterintuitive implications these have. e.g. you could say that the badness of minor ailments does not aggregate. Then you choose between the counterintuitive implications of this vs the aggregative view. This seems to be a bad way to go about it because it starts at the wrong level.
What we should do is assess at the level of rationales. The aggregative view has a rationale, viz (crudely) more of a good thing is better, Clearly, it’s better to cure lots of mild ailments that it is to cure one. The goodness of doing so does not diminish: curing one additional person is always as valuable no matter how many other people you have cured. If so, it follows that curing enough mild ailments must eventually be better than curing one really bad ailment. A response to this needs to criticise this rationale not merely point out that it has a weird seeming implication. Lots of things have weird seeming implications, including e.g. quantum physics, evolution. Pointing out that quantum physics has counterintuitive implications should not be the primary level at which we debate the truth of quantum physics.
Thanks for the link, Halstead. A very good article, but it doesn’t totally cure my unease with aggregating across individuals. But I don’t expect to ever find anything that is fully in line with intuitions, as I think intuitions are contradictory. :-)
I don’t agree with the response suggested (recognising that it cites an article I co-authored). The DALY and QALY metrics imply the ARC. It seems reasonable that these metrics or ones similar are in some sense definitive of EA in global poverty and health.
Then the question is whether it is correct to aggregate small benefits. It’s fair to say there is philosophical disagreement about this, but nevertheless (in my view) a strong case to be made that the fully aggregative view is correct. One way to approach this, probably the dominant way in moral philosophy, is to figure out the implications of philosophical views and then to choose between the various counterintuitive implications these have. e.g. you could say that the badness of minor ailments does not aggregate. Then you choose between the counterintuitive implications of this vs the aggregative view. This seems to be a bad way to go about it because it starts at the wrong level.
What we should do is assess at the level of rationales. The aggregative view has a rationale, viz (crudely) more of a good thing is better, Clearly, it’s better to cure lots of mild ailments that it is to cure one. The goodness of doing so does not diminish: curing one additional person is always as valuable no matter how many other people you have cured. If so, it follows that curing enough mild ailments must eventually be better than curing one really bad ailment. A response to this needs to criticise this rationale not merely point out that it has a weird seeming implication. Lots of things have weird seeming implications, including e.g. quantum physics, evolution. Pointing out that quantum physics has counterintuitive implications should not be the primary level at which we debate the truth of quantum physics.
See this—http://spot.colorado.edu/~norcross/Comparingharms.pdf
Thanks for the link, Halstead. A very good article, but it doesn’t totally cure my unease with aggregating across individuals. But I don’t expect to ever find anything that is fully in line with intuitions, as I think intuitions are contradictory. :-)