Hi! Because this version of the paper is in the economics literature, we don’t explicitly interact with negative utilitarianism (we have a companion working paper in progress for the philosophy literature and might draw it out there more). There seem to be different concepts of negative utilitarianism in the literature. Versions that only care about negative-utility lives ($\sum{u_i : u_i < 0} u_i $) would not not satisfy Pareto or Aggregation and therefore would not be covered under the main result, Theorem 1 (although I might personally say that makes them odd to call utilitarianism). But these would be covered under the broader result, Proposition 1.
deanspears
Karma: 387
The main result extends the RC formalization to versions that include an unaffected part of the population (such as dead past people) and shows that all Aggregative social welfare functions that satisfy basic axioms that are uncontroversial in the population economics literature imply this. That includes, for example, average utilitarianism, number-dampened utilitarianism, average and total prioritarianism and egalitarianism, and many approaches commonly understood to escape the RC, including all same-number separable approaches. Of course, what makes it the length of a paper is talking about why this makes sense in the literature! We also have an extended result that covers an even larger set of social welfare functions.
Hi! Thanks for your careful read of our paper and thougthful summary. I think this paragraph is especially good: “I take them to say that Parfit & others were looking not for forms of utilitarianism that avoided any repugnant conclusion, but for ones that avoided some specific repugnant conclusion for some specific hypothetical populations (such as those originally described by Parfit). But there are still, for all forms of utilitarianism – including those that solve Parfit’s original problem – other repugnant conclusions for other hypothetical populations. And because the particular hypothetical populations that produce repugnant conclusions are different in different variants of utilitarianism, they cannot easily be compared & repugnant conclusions are therefore not a good measure.”
Ah, ok. Well, if then we still have TU on that set, it would satisfy all of the axioms including Aggregation, so Theorem 1 would apply, but I suppose you have some sort of asterisk that the A and Z populations (large perfectly-equal populations in which everyone has a positive (if slightly) life) are part of an impossible subset of the imaginable set of populations.
But of course the A and Z populations are already impossible, because we already have present and past lives that aren’t perfectly equal and aren’t all worth living. So—even setting aside possible boundedness on the number of lives—the RC has always fundamentally been about comparing undeniably impossible populations. That, of course, is yet another reason why we might downgrade the importance of the RC in our decisions about what to believe and do.
Hi! I thought I might jump in to make sure we’re not conflating the Medium essay, which wasn’t written by the whole group, the Social Choice and Welfare paper, which Mark Budolfson and I wrote, and the Utilitas paper, which reflects the whole group. It is not the case that the Utilitas paper, as you write, “basically just calls for a greater/lesser amount of attention to be paid to some issue” (although that would not necessarily seem bad—often there are collaborative statements about methodology in the research literature; see, for a valuable example Lancet Commissions). Here is the main claim of the Utilitas paper, which takes a substantive position in population ethics:
1. What we agree on
We agree on the following:
1. The fact that an approach to population ethics (an axiology or a social ordering) entails the Repugnant Conclusion is not sufficient to conclude that the approach is inadequate. Equivalently, avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion is not a necessary condition for a minimally adequate candidate axiology, social ordering, or approach to population ethics.
To respond to the other thoughts:
Population ethics has, from the beginning, been an interdisciplinary field including economists (who are more likely to collaborate and sometimes address policy audiences), philosophers (who are more likely to address scholarly audiences and tend to write single-authored papers), and others. So there is already a long and valuable interdisciplinary tradition of collaborations in population ethics, especially where population interacts with public policy. An important IPCC consensus document talks about it, for example. The Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm achieves distinction in the field by promoting high-quality interdisciplinary collaborations in large part about population ethics, with an explicit goal of being policy-relevant (and with, I understand, public funding). This sort of interdisciplinary, multi-author collaboration is especially common in climate research, but one sees it in many fields. Here is a similar example from my home field of sanitation in developing countries, where we were concerned that the scholarly and policy implications of a few prominent randomized experiments were being misunderstood.
Of course, there are incentives throughout scholarly publishing and careers. Academic publishing is never a level playing field. Some people have incentives to overstate their disagreement or invent a new idea so that they can start a career. Some people have an incentive to defend old views so that they can maintain a career. Attention, time, and resources are all scarce, so there is no easy solution to the challenge of experts needing to choose what they are going to pay more attention to.
Yes! Nice paper! Lexical views don’t get as much attention in economics as in philosophy, but it’s well worth tracking down and sealing off that apparent leak. And, as you point out, being sensible about risk puts a lot of discipline on our proposals for population ethics.
… so let’s stop writing in a way that assumes that avoiding the RC is necessary to be “satisfactory.” :) Then a satisfactory population ethics is possible!
Hi, everyone! I think the question here is focused on the higher order questions of what GiveWell will recommend (and one level higher) how to ask forecasting questions about it. But, to not answer that, I will say that at r.i.c.e., our fieldwork in India is, in the sense of a majority of our time, effort and staff, mostly spent on lactation consulting and Kangaroo Mother Care for low birthweight babies right now. (One question for the author might be whether a KMC program, which is fundamentally about breastfeeding but also has other mechanisms (keeping the baby warm, keeping the caregiver informed about the baby’s status) would could as breastfeeding promotion for this forecast.)
We’re working in Uttar Pradesh, which is a context where women’s modesty is an important cultural issue. But one challenge we are facing is demand: it’s hard for us to get mothers and families more broadly to want to go along with our program. I don’t think this should have surprised us so much, but in fact the bindingness of this constraint did surprise us. I would be very excited to hear about practical research, ethnography, or just trial and error anyone is doing about this.
From a prioritization point of view, this sort of approach competes against more resource-intensive neonatal care, such as investing in incubators (which may or may not be plugged in and turned on) which work against establishing breastfeeding by separating the moms and babies. So, another indirect way of doing “breastfeeding promotion” may be to lean against that sort of medicalized policy.
Like so many things for early-life health in poor populations (open defecation, clean cooking fuel use,...), this is an area where the “second stage” biological mechanism seems very well established to me, and what we need is good evidence and strategies for a better “first stage” effect of programs on behavior change.
I’m very glad to see this, and I just want to add that there is a recent burst in the literature that is deepening or expanding the Harsanyi framework. There are a lot of powerful arguments for aggregation and separability, and it turns out that aggregation in one dimension generates aggregation in others. Broome’s Weighing Goods is an accessible(ish) place to start.
Fleurbaey (2009): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165176509002894
McCarthy et al (2020): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304406820300045?via%3Dihub
A paper of mine with Zuber, about risk and variable population together: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xwxAkZlOeqc4iMeXNhBFipB6bTmJR6UN/view
As you can see, this literature is pretty technical for now. But I am optimistic that in 10 years it will be the case both that the experts much better understand these arguments and that they are more widely known and appreciated.
Johan Gustafsson is also working in this space. This link isn’t about Harsanyi-style arguments, but is another nice path up the mountain: https://johanegustafsson.net/papers/utilitarianism-without-moral-aggregation.pdf
Thank you very much! We are excited to learn about this!
Hi, everyone! Just to circle back and close the loop: GiveWell has confirmed to us that their legal organization is indeed a public charity, so r.i.c.e. will not have a tipping problem. A big thank you to Jason for figuring that out! We still believe we can put marginal funds to great use, but it is not urgent in this particular “tipping” way. Thanks, everyone!
Hi, I’m Dean, a coauthor on the paper. I’m sorry you’re having trouble getting the paper. This link should get it for you without charge: https://rdcu.be/chNpG
The journal emailed me “As part of the Springer Nature SharedIt initiative, you can now publicly share a full-text view-only version of your paper by using the link below… There are no restrictions on the number of people you may share this link with, how many times they can view the linked article or where you can post the link online. ”
I’m happy to talk more about the paper!