GiveWell's Charity Recommendations Require Taking a Controversial Stance on Population Ethics

(Edit: I no longer endorse suffering-focused ethics.)

Regardless of your stance on population ethics, I think in general it makes sense to take DALYs as a heuristic for how much good you can do with your money. Clearly all population ethical views consider improving existing lives in quality (decreasing YLDs, years lived with disability) a good thing. Preventing deaths expressed through reducing YLLs (Years of Life Lost) is probably overall good as well, although different views will assign more or less value to it. I agree with Michael Dickens that if the value of longer lives comes from adding life-years (reducing YLL) alone, this would indeed amount to something like total utilitarianism.

I think a steelman of GiveWell's view would be that in fact the YLL component of DALYs can be motivated by some other things, like preference dissatisfaction or decreasing the suffering of the parents of children as well. I believe that for reasons of cooperation between agents it always makes sense to consider the preferences of other beings at least to some degree. Fulfilling already existing preferences seems like something most people would agree to, whether they would also like to bring additional fulfilled preferences into existence or not. Therefore, death is intrinsically bad according to most reasonable views, since it violates the preferences of existing beings severely. In that sense, decreasing YLLs should be always good, even for non-classical utilitarians.

Unlike Michael, I personally would be less reluctant to accept a ranking of world states that can’t be boiled down to an easy mathematical function of the aggregated wellbeing, i.e. I’d be less turned off by more “complex” moral views. And I’d be less willing to bite bullets like the repugnant conclusion, or the “very repugnant conclusion,” where a world with fewer, but very happy individuals can be worse than a world containing any finite amount of extreme torture that is outweighed by an even greater amount of beings that live lives just barely worth living. Accepting this conclusion is a quite a controversial stance in my eyes. Given anti-realism, it is absolutely unclear to me why GiveWell would have to adhere to a total utilitarian view. They could very well accept all the inconsistencies Michael mentions and still just maximize EV according to their own (complex) values. I agree that they should probably specify their view more explicitly and it remains unclear what they are really optimizing for (see also http://blog.givewell.org/2008/08/22/dalys-and-disagreement/).

A candidate I am favouring that could possibly match a lot of people's intuitions would be something like negative idealized preference utilitarianism or more generally any form of suffering-focused ethics (e.g. trying to reduce extreme involuntary suffering without doing anything crazy or anything that would be considered really bad by other agents).

(cross-posted here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/1071588459564177/)

I thought you might like to know that, after a few days' thought and discussion, this reminder of my population ethics concerns has made me switch my donations from AMF to SCI; I originally favoured this over life-saving interventions for population ethics reasons back in 2010, six years ago. (My concerns are slightly broader ones about the difficulty of knowing how and why deaths are bad - without doubting that they are - but I don't have time to go into them any time soon.)

But more importantly, donors should be aware of how questions of population ethics affect the expected value of different interventions.

Thank you for emphasizing this--I think it's very important.

I've realized lately that my views on questions of population ethics are very underdeveloped, which is problematic because it leaves me very uncertain about the relative importance of different causes and the expected value of different interventions, which leads me to postpone donating more until I have better information (and also possibly leads me to not engage in direct-impact work that I possibly should be engaging in due to not knowing what that work that I should be engaging in is).

Note that because questions of population ethics can change the expected value of possible interventions from positive to negative (or vice versa) and by orders of magnitude rather than just a few percentage points, my lack of confident answers to questions of population ethics seems to be a good reason to postpone making any further donations until I have better information on my views on those questions.

If donors understood these assumptions, I expect that many of them would prioritize their donations differently.

I wonder... To what extent it is true that donor ignorance about their views on questions of population ethics (and related questions about their values) leads donors to confidently choose one charity or intervention over another when in fact if they understood their views on population ethics correctly then they would have chosen the other charity or intervention?

I used to think that I knew what I valued well enough to choose where to donate, but now I realize that I have to think more on certain questions of population ethics to at least figure out what approximate probability I would assign to each possible way of valuing things before I can know which cause and intervention I believe has the highest expected value and is worth donating to.

Here's a third resolution. Consider a utility function that is a weighted sum of:

1. how close a region's population level is to the "ideal" population level for that region (i.e. not underpopulated or overpopulated)
2. average utility of individuals in this region (not observer-moments in this region)

AMF is replacing lots of lives that are short (therefore low-utility) with fewer lives that are long (therefore higher utility), without affecting population level much. The effect of this could be summarized as "35 DALYs", as in "we increased the average lifespan by 35 DALYs / total population".

(warning: made-up numbers follow). Suppose we make someone live for 40 years instead of 5 years by curing malaria. This reduces the fertility rate; let's say one fewer 35-year life happens as a result. This has no effect on the average population level (part 1). We replaced a 5-year life plus a 35-year life with a 40-year life. If average lives in the region are 35 years long (and we're pretending that life utility = length of life), then most of the effect on part 2 of the utility function comes from preventing a worse-than-average life from happening.

Suppose instead that we extend someone's life from 40 years to 75 years (a gain of 35 DALYs). This reduces the fertility rate; let's pretend that this prevents a 35-year life from happening. So we're replacing a 40-year life plus a 35-year life with a 75-year life. From the perspective of part 2 of the utility function, this is exactly as good as curing a case of malaria. So it seems like you can measure life-extending measures in DALYs pretty naively and things work out (both 35-DALY improvements are equally good under the utility function).

GiveWell claims that AMF is about 10 times more cost-effective than GiveDirectly, and GiveWell ranks AMF as its top charity partially on this basis (see “Summary of key considerations for top charities” in the linked article). This claim depends on the assumption that saving a life creates 35 QALYs.

I'm sorry but I didn't have time to read this post in full and can't comment on the philosophical issues. I also cannot speak for GiveWell and the following is just my personal interpretation of their cost-effectiveness analysis.

I think the statement above is a based on a misunderstanding of Givewell's cost-effectiveness analyses.

GiveWell writes here: "We do include possible developmental impacts on children who sleep under an LLIN: we estimate that sleeping under an LLIN provides the same developmental impacts that a deworming pill provides. However, most of the benefit provided by LLINs is in the lives that LLINs save, not in their impact on development." http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/amf#Costperlifesaved

I think this is what the 10x better than GiveDirectly refers to. Deworming charities have a similar effect on development and are also ranked as about 10x as good as cash-transfers and rarely cause mortality, which leads me to believe that the child mortality reduction is not included in that part of the cost-effectiveness analysis, but rather modelled separately.

Thanks for writing this up; this is important to think about.

Standard person-affecting view says that it is not wrong to cause someone to exist whose life is net positive, so A is not worse than B

GiveWell's data on deaths prevented is entirely based on children under age 5. I don't think we have good information on children's subjective experience, and I'm not totally willing to assume that their lives are particularly enjoyable. Being a newborn in particular seems pretty unpleasant to me, and I could easily believe that the experience of living to age 1 month and then developing a fatal case of malaria is net negative. But given that happiness by age seems generally U-shaped, perhaps it's reasonable to assume that being a toddler is pretty fun.

Interesting post, thanks! Updating somewhat after reading it.

One concern I had about this claim:

When you perform act 1 A, a child (let’s call her Afiya) is born, gets malaria, and dies. Under act B, you cause Afiya not to be born. According to assumption (1), this act is not worse than A. Standard person-affecting view says that it is not wrong to cause someone to exist whose life is net positive, so A is not worse than B.

To me it seems that a child being born and then immediately dying of malaria is net negative for the family of the child, in terms of suffering due to loss of a child, compared to the child not being conceived at all. So from this perspective, B<A. If you think this makes sense to you, how does this affect your calculations?

On "A Paradox":

" According to assumption (1), this act is not worse than A. Standard person-affecting view says that it is not wrong to cause someone to exist whose life is net positive, so A is not worse than B. Under act C, you cause Afiya to be born and prevent her from getting malaria. This beats act A according to (2), and is not better than act B according to (1). Thus, A = B, B ≥ C, and C > A. But this creates a contradiction: B > A and B = A. "

This argument appears to assume completeness, but it's far from clear that those who believe that adding good lives does not make an outcome better should accept completeness. (Broome 2005, "Should We Value Population?", shows that they should not, provided they accept transitivity and the sort of choice-set independence implicitly assumed here).

Commenting here to raise a counter-argument to one of my claims that no one has brought up yet. In the section "Bigger Problems", I claim that the cost-effectiveness calculations implicitly endorse that acts B, C, and D are equivalent. I don't think this is necessarily true though. Just because a cost-effectiveness calculation doesn't include something doesn't mean that thing doesn't matter. The calculations also don't include flow-through effects on the economy, or on factory farmed animals, or on lots of other things. So you could say that the GiveWell view endorses B < D and B < C, and then just doesn't include this in the cost-effectiveness calculations.

I haven't seen GiveWell emphasize that AMF is 10x as cost-effective as GiveDirectly. In fact, they frequently say that cost-effectiveness estimates shouldn't be taken literally. Nor have I seen them say that they're consequentialist. Many of their heuristics are roughly consequentialist, but that doesn't mean that they endorse strict utilitarianism. It's unclear what you mean by "controversial", but the GiveWell view is far more popular among the general public (and probably even among moral philosophers) than the total view of utilitarianism.

If you reject pure consequentialism, then there's no paradox. Non-consequentialist views tolerate path-dependence. It can be morally neutral to go from 99 happy people to 100 happy people, but morally bad to go from 100 happy people to 99 (via preventable death).

You're free to disagree with GiveWell's values, but calling them paradoxical or contradictory is unjustified. Rejecting an argument's premise isn't the same as refuting the argument.

I broadly agree, the moral uncertainty over additional life years has also reduced my estimates in the intervention (not written up yet). You’ve added a few considerations I hadn’t taken into account yet, and those seem to weaken the case for LLIN distributions further.

I have a separate set of doubts about the comparison between YLL and YLD. For most highly malarial countries that I checked, the YLD per affected person per year through malaria are around 0.018 while the YLL per affected (dead) person per year are 1. So it seems that being dead is 50 times worse than suffering from malaria. Some of the elicitation methods of disability weights seem to determine a ranking of disabilities and then scale it to the 0–1 interval or not allow for values > 1 inherently. If the worst disabilities are “really” (according to subjective views we empathize with) far worse than death, some that are about as bad as death will be scaled down to a really small disability weight. There may be other elicitation methods I haven’t looked at though.

One note: DALYs are something negative, so one typically wants more QALYs but wants to avert DALYs.

Another note: The “GiveWell view” is more widely known as “the Asymmetry”—unless there are subtle differences I’m overlooking.

You can choose between three possible acts. When you perform act A, a child (let’s call her Afiya) is born, gets malaria, and dies. Under act B, you cause Afiya not to be born. According to assumption (1), this act is not worse than A. Standard person-affecting view says that it is not wrong to cause someone to exist whose life is net positive, so A is not worse than B. Under act C, you cause Afiya to be born and prevent her from getting malaria. This beats act A according to (2), and is not better than act B according to (1). Thus, A = B, B ≥ C, and C > A. But this creates a contradiction: B > A and B = A.

If the fact that "act [B] is not worse than A" leads to the equation A = B, then why does the fact "[act C] is not better than act B" lead to the equation B ≥ C? It would make more sense if you simply said B = C, as the current equation seems to raise the possibility that B is better than C without offering any justification for that view.

For example, last year when Stanford Effective Altruism was considering making donations to charity, we preferred the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative over AMF because we believed that GiveWell gave too much significance to the “GiveWell view” of population ethics and not enough to the total view.

I'm confused about how the differences between SCI and AMF connect to population ethics. Neither charity seems like it would have obvious effects on the birth rate. Both schistomiasis and malaria do harm through a mix of killing people and lowering their subsequent quality of life, but I guess it's a different mix and the demographics of the people affected is different? It would help a lot to lay out specifically what those differences are.

I think that adopting your first resolution, in addition to the assumption by commenters that being a child with malaria is a net negative experience, can rescue some of the value of AMF. Say in situation 1, a family has a child, Afiya, who eventually gets malaria and dies, and thus has a net negative experience. Because of this, the family decides to have a second child, Brian, who does not get malaria and lives a full and healthy life. In situation 2, where AMF is taken to have a contribution, a family has just one child, Afiya, who is prevented from getting malaria and lives a full and healthy life. The family does not decide to have a second child. Only taking into account the utility of the people directly affected by malaria, and not the family, it seems to me that situation 1 is worse than situation 2 by an amount equivalent to Afiya's net negative experience of getting malaria; the reverse of this could be said to be AMF's contribution. So while this is not the same as 35 QALY's, it still seems like a net positive.

EDIT: Note of clarification: The above is in particular a response to the statement, "Because AMF hardly changes humans’ lifespans, it does not have a clear beneficial effect for humans," which was stated as a problem for Givewell with adopting the first resolution.