Thanks for asking Devon! 

On the margin, our commissioned reports cost ~$7,000-$30,000 depending on the scope (this particular report being on the lower end of that spectrum). That being said, we don't take in every commissioned work that comes our way and only have the capacity to take on a few projects at this price because: (1) we have longer term agreements with a couple of organizations for which we do a lot of work, (2) we want our team to have the capacity to pursue independent projects we think are promising.

That being said, you're always welcome to reach out if there are specific projects you are interested in. We always welcome new ideas and look forward to connecting with new individuals/organizations :)

I am just coming from a What We Owe the Future reading group - thanks for reminding me of the gap between my moral untuitions and total utilitarianism!

One reason why I am not convinded by your argument is that I am not sure that the additional lifes lived due to the unintended pregnancies are globally net-positive:

• on the one hand, it does seem quite likely that their lives will be subjectively worth living (the majority of people agrees with this statement and it does not seem to me that these lives would be too different) and that they would have net-positive relationships in the future.
• but on the other hand, given a level of human technology, there is some finite number of people on earth which is optimal form a total utility standpoint. And given the current state of biodiversity loss, soil erosion and global warming, it does not seem obvious that humanity is below that number^[1]
• as a third part, given that these are unintended pregnancies, it does seem likely that there are resource limitations which would lead to hardships if a person is born. We would need to know a lot about the life situation and social support structures of the potential parents if we wanted to estimate how significant this effect is, but it could easily be non-trivial.
• edited to add and remove: the number of 100 pregnancies averted does not correspond to 100 fewer children being born in the end. A significant part of the pregnancies would only be shifted in time. I would be surprised if the true number is larger than 10 and expect it to be lower than this. My reasoning here is that the total number of children each set of parents is going to have will hardly be reduced by 100x from access to contraception. If this number started at 10 children and is reduced to a single child, we have a reduction that corresponds to 10 fewer births per death averted. And stated like this, even the number 10 seems quite high (sorry, there were a few confusions in this argument)

This being said, the main reason why I am emotionally unconvinced by the argument you give is probably that I am on some level unable to contemplate "failing to have children" as something that is morally bad. My intuitions have somewhat cought up with the arguments that giving happy lives the opportunity to exist is a great thing, but they do not agree to the sign-flipped case for now. Probably, a part of this is that I do not trust myself (or others) to actually reason clearly on this topic and this just feels like "do not go there" emotionally.

FWIW, basically the same argument would also undermine almost all global health work and other neartermist work. Why work on saving hundreds or thousands or even millions of lives when you can reduce the probability of extinction and marginally increase the probability of 10^50 (or whatever) happy conscious beings coming into existence?

The difference is mostly a matter of degree: in extinction prevention compared to family planning, we have much smaller probabilities for the high payoff possibility (of preventing extinction+total view) and much larger payoffs conditional on the payoff.

I don't think it makes sense to single out family planning in particular with this kind of argument.

Thanks for your comment Ariel. We haven’t attempted to assess the value of different population ethics views, or how those would affect the (cost-)effectiveness of FEM’s work. We believe that that is a highly complex topic that would take more time than the short period we had to conduct this research. Work on this would benefit from the Worldview Investigations Team at Rethink Priorities, which could explore family planning topics in the future. I'm sorry we neglected to add that to the editorial note and disclaimer. I will edit it to reflect this.

(Edited slightly for accuracy/precision and grammar.)

MEC=maximizing expected choiceworthiness, and PAV=person-affecting view.

~99% doesn’t follow from MEC alone. You need MEC+specific intertheoretic comparisons where individual welfare under PAVs has similar or lower absolute moral value as individual welfare under the total view (or similar enough views). And you need to ground such intertheoretic comparisons. There may be a case for it, but some versions of the PAVs will probably ground value quite differently and in basically incompatible ways from any total view, so these comparisons wouldn't be justified between those versions and the total view. You'd have to use another approach to moral uncertainty (possibly along with MEC+intertheoretic comparisons in more limited cases), and the other approaches wouldn't generally be nearly as sensitive to the foregone welfare of the children not born.

I'd also guess wide person-affecting views (prioritize quality and longevity, not population size) and asymmetric person-affecting views are more popular than person-affecting neutrality, and would probably be endorsed under further reflection by most people initially attracted to neutrality over neutrality. These views still endorse making people happy over making happy people.

That being said, once you include the effects on a group of farmed animals, you should also probably include the effects on all (including wild) animals with similar or greater average moral weight and probability of moral patienthood, at least if you care about outcomes somewhat regardless of active contribution, e.g. if you're a utilitarian of any kind. This complicates things further.

This kind of conclusion is a great example of why a totalist utilitarian view is absurd.