EA - Saving Lives vs Creating Lives by Richard Y Chappell

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Saving Lives vs Creating Lives, published by Richard Y Chappell on December 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.tl;dr: Total utilitarianism treats saving lives and creating new lives as equivalent (all else equal). This seems wrong: funding fertility is not an adequate substitute for bednets. We can avoid this result by giving separate weight to both person-directed and undirected (or "impersonal") reasons. We have weak impersonal reasons to bring an extra life into existence, while we have both impersonal and person-directed reasons to aid an existing individual. This commonsense alternative to totalism still entails longtermism, as zillions of weak impersonal reasons to bring new lives into existence can add up to overwhelmingly strong reasons to prevent human extinction.Killing vs Failing to CreateI think the strongest objection to total utilitarianism is that it risks collapsing the theoretical distinction between killing and failing to create. (Of course, there would still be good practical reasons to maintain such a distinction in practice; but I think there’s a principled distinction here that our theories ought to accommodate.) While I think it’s straightforwardly good to bring more awesome lives into existence, and so failing to create an awesome life constitutes a missed opportunity for doing good, premature death is not just a “missed opportunity” for a good future, it’s harmful in a way that should especially concern us.For example, we clearly have much stronger moral reasons to save the life of a young child (e.g. by funding anti-malarial bednets) than to simply cause an extra child to exist (e.g. by funding fertility treatments or incentivizing procreation). If totalism can’t accommodate this moral datum, that would seem a serious problem for the view.How can we best accommodate this datum? I think there may be two distinct intuitions in the vicinity that I’d want to accommodate:(1) Something about the intrinsic badness of (undesired) death.(2) Counting both person-directed and undirected (“impersonal”) moral reasons.The Intrinsic Harm of DeathMost of the harm of death is comparative: not bad in itself, but worse than the alternative of living on. Importantly, we only have reason to avoid comparative harms in ways that secure the better alternative. To see this, suppose that if you save a child’s life, they’ll live two more decades and then die from an illness that robs them of five decades more life. That latter death is then really bad for them. Does it follow that you shouldn’t save the child’s life after all (since it exposes them to a more harmful death later)? Of course not. The later death is worse compared to living the five decades extra, but letting them die now would do them even less good, no matter that the early death — in depriving them of just two decades of life — is not “as bad” (comparatively speaking) as the later death would be (in a different context with a different point of comparison).So we should not aim to minimize comparative harms of this sort: that would lead us badly astray. But it’s a tricky question whether the harm of death is purely comparative. In ‘Value Receptacles’ (2015, p. 323), I argued that it plausibly is not:Besides preventing the creation of future goods, death is also positively disvaluable insofar as it involves the interruption and thwarting of important life plans, projects, and goals. If such thwarting has sufficient disvalue, it could well outweigh the slight increase in hedonic value obtained in the replacement scenario [where one person is “struck down in the prime of life and replaced with a marginally happier substitute”].Thwarted goals and projects may make death positively bad to some extent. But the extent must be limited. However tragic it is to die in one’s teens (say), I don’t ...