I'm the Director of the Happier Lives Institute, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre, and a co-author of the World Happiness Report. I'm a philosopher by background and did my DPhil at Oxford under the supervision of Peter Singer and Hilary Greaves. My research interests mostly - and unsurprisingly given the above - relate to the nature, measurement, and maximisation of (human) wellbeing, but I've also thought or written about the badness of death, population ethics, moral uncertainty, and non-sentient welfare and probably other things. You can find an (occassionally updated) list of my publications on ORCID.
I've previously worked for an MP and failed to start a start-up. I live with my wife in Bristol, England.
I continue to be super impressed with RP's CCF, which is a major intellectual challenge to take on.
I've been thinking about it quite a lot since I saw it launch last year and learnt it uses the theory of moral uncertainty I co-developed, the Moral Marketplace (MMT; published in Ergo) which RP calls 'proportional allocation'. We only proposed a 'toy model' there, whereas RP has operationalised it. That prompted me to think harder about how to apply MMT in reality. I gave a talk on this at EAGxOxford last weekend to force me to do that.
I've got two main comments so far about where the model could be improved. FWIW, here are my talk slides which may not be very easy to follow as they are. I'll try and write those up into an essay in the next few weeks.
First, I think there's a more theoretically appropriate way to divide up morality than the 14 theories the CCF has. I do not think it's 'carving reality and its joints'. Moral theories are like LEGO, and built up out of the combined set of choices one makes across each debate in ethics. As such, the way that seems maximally appropriate would be having one 'bucket'/'worldview' for each possible moral theory. That ends up being way too complicated, as there are something like 6,000 distinct moral theories, and this is before one starts thinking about scalar issues. I suggest a shortcut - thinking about which moral debates are decision-relevant - but I confess I haven't fully worked it out or understood how RP's model works. But potentially the CCF's outputs are quite sensitive to how one divides up moral theories/worldviews, and there may be a better way to do this.
Second, practically - and semi-self-interestedly - another issue with the CCF is that the Happier Lives Institute's Fund doesn't feature anywhere, and isn't listed as something you're planning to look at. The maxim for MMT is that you allocate your resources to each project in proportion to your credence that it is the best. Given this, is the CCF implicitly assigning a 0% credence to (human) welfare consisting in happiness? A 0% credence that improving human happiness could be the best thing? Neither of those seem plausible, nor I assume are not what RP's staff believe. Potentially there's another explanation, but I am not sure what it would be! Hence, there seems to be at least one significant practical gap stemming from the model's design.
I'm happy to advise on further stages and, once again, congratulations with your work so far on this truly Heruclean task.
I posted about this on LinkedIn and contacted the lead author, so I thought I'd (lazily) repeat what I there:
"Dirk-Jan Koch and Martijn Klop have just published an article on 'effective altruism's blindspot', arguing that effective altruists overlook negative unintended effects and do not consider the wider impacts of interventions.
When I read the paper, one thing that tickled me is that it also suggested a blindspot effective altruism's critics have about effective altruism's blindspots.
Okay, I recognise that may seem a bit convoluted, but hear me out. To explain, the authors talk about 'effective altruism', but all(?) the discussion is about GiveWell's analyses. GiveWell =/= effective altruism, even though it's the biggest name.
I wished they'd engaged with Happier Lives Institute's work - they mention the use of 'subjective wellbeing' approvingly, in passing - as I think it substantially avoids the blind spots they have in mind. Indeed, HLI's work is motivated both by the ideals of effective altruism and a desire to avoid those blind spots.
As they argue, the issue with focusing on a narrow metric, like increased consumption or reduced incidence of a disease, is that an intervention may be good at doing that, but cause negative consequences to other aspects of a person's life which aren't captured.
If you were to instead measure someone's subjective wellbeing over time - using, say, life satisfaction questions - then you can capture the overall effects for them. This is an advantage of the wellbeing approach, which HLI has pioneered.
Further, the authors talk about 'spillovers' - impacts on those beyond the direct recipient. You can also capture the overall impact of spillovers by asking those people to report their wellbeing. Data are pretty sparse here, but in HLI we've been attempting to account for spillovers for years (for cash transfers and other interventions).
Obviously, it's difficult to critique a movement, when different people and organisations think different things. That said, the issues they frame as blindspots 'for effective altruism' are issues I and HLI have been raising with/inside effective altruism for years. See, for instance and most recently, my talk at the Effective Altruism Global conference in San Francisco this year on EA's 'missing metric'.
Clearly, we have not publicised our work well enough!"
Ah, this is great! Thanks so much for doing it. I want to honour this the only way philosophers know how, which is to quibble with some details in an effort to improve it. (I thought a lot about population ethics during my PhD, but I haven't published anything evaluating the theories).
On your comment that the answers are contradictory or counterintutive or both, I want to add this is very much agreed on in the field. The famous result is Arrhenius (2000), which showed there are a number of assumptions we might want to make about population ethics, but they are mutually inconsistent - you can't eat your cake and still have it.
Because population ethics is so vexing, it's very tempting to consider it in light of theories of moral uncertainty. So, rather than thinking you are, or have to be, 100% certain in one view, you recognise that you have credence in multiple views, and then you'd appeal to a theory of moral uncertainty (there are a few options here, which complicates things) to determine what's appropriate to do in light of your uncertainty. Implicitly, this quiz - along with standard philosophical discourse - assumes a 'My Favourite Theory' approach to moral uncertainty (act if you're certain in theory you think is mostly likely correct). Accounting for (other positions in) moral uncertainty may slightly break the quiz, as there can be more than one justification for picking an answer. Admittedly, this would make the quiz much more fiddly and be harder to implement.
One example is Q4, where you give two identical populations, except there's a new, miserable person in the second. I'm sympathetic to a person-affecting view (count only sure-to-exist lives) and if I were 100% confident in that I'd say they were exactly as good each other. However, when I account for moral uncertainty, as I give some weight to possible lives, the second population is worse as that miserable life breaks the tie. So, I gave the 'wrong' answer if I ignore moral uncertainty, but I gave what I think is the right answer after accounting for it. I'm not sure how your quiz interprets this, but it told me I had a lexical or critical view, which I wouldn't agree with. Same issue for Q5 and Q10, which are about identical populations except for 1 additional life.
You phrase Q7 and Q8, which are related to the Repugnant Conclusion, as if they are structurally identically. But they are not. Q7 is a same people case, and asks if it's better to have higher average welfare. Q8 is about going from the A population to the Z population (the classic Repugnant Conclusion challenge), but each step in Q8 you're adding new people, whereas in Q7 you had the same people. So, wearing my person-affecting hat, I interpret Q7 and Q8 quite differently: I'm happy to have a higher total welfare for the same population (Q7), but I'm inclined not to go to step B in Q8, as that means creating new people (no value) and reducing the welfare of the existing people (negative value). You frame Q8 as "do it again" but I'd argue we're doing something relevantly different between Q7 and Q8.
Q12 and Q13 are about transitivity. In Q12 you're looking at 3 worlds where the first is better than the second, and second is better than the third. For Q13 you replace 'better than' with 'exactly as good as'. You give two options in each case ("yes, always", "no, not always") but I wanted there to be a third option "it depends on the details". Specifically, I'm wondering about whether we've got the same or different people across the three worlds.
Finally, I agree that accounting for population ethics, and population effects, can substantially influence the priorities in unexpected and arguably repugnant way. You pointed out life-saving and life-averting invertions are in tension. An extension of this is the more(/less) you think the Earth is overpopulated, the less(/more) valuable it is to save lives. Another is that if you think factory farming is bad because of the negative welfare it causes, that should reduce the value of saving lives to some (unknown and perhaps unknowable) extent. Many years ago, I wrote about these in my PhD thesis and subsequently published a paper on the meat eater problem. I confess I find this all weird to think about, which is part of the reason I've shifted onto other things since...
Thanks again for creating it!
Thanks for mentioning our work in HLI here @huw. I/we are not so active on the forum these days, so you beat us to it.
But yes, @madeleine_foley, HLI really got started, now 7 years ago, because we thought that the standard economist approach of focusing on just health and wealth was not going a good job of capturing what people's lives are like on the inside. We've been pioneering wellbeing cost-effectiveness analysis and a metric called WELLBYs (wellbeing years) to see what the priorities are if you 'take happiness seriously'. (Oddly, we were the first team to do wellbeing ROI, but now quite a few others, including the UK and NZ Treasuries, use the same method, although not because of us). We concluded that mental health is a neglected priority, and have been recommended charities working on it for the last few years, and advocating for it more broadly. Huw's organisation, Kaya Guides, is one we're very excited about, and he's right that global human happiness and mental health is an emergent part of the wider cause area of 'global health and wellbeing', and just wasn't part of the conversation in effective altruism before.
Just to say, and speaking from the Happier Lives Institute perspective, I really liked both of the thoughtful precommittment and the care you've taken to plan this RCT. We look forward with great interest to digging into this further!
There's actually quite a bit of GHD discussion that going on among people in EA orgs, but not on the forum. For instance, just yesterday, the Unjournal hosted a workshop on using wellbeing and how to do WELLBY vs DALY trade-offs, which had EG org staff and various academics in attendance (thanks to David Reinstein for making it happen!).
Based on that, and other conversations, I am considering writing some things in the area, so maybe your wish will come true, Nick...
Some updates from the Happier Lives Institute.
Thanks for this. I think this is very valuable and really appreciate this being set out. I expect to come back to it a few times. One query and one request from further work - from someone, not necessarily you, as this is already a sterling effort!
I've heard Thorstad's TOP talk a couple of times, but it's now a bit foggy and I can't remember where his ends and yours starts. Is it that Thorstad argues (some version of) longtermism relies on the TOP thesis, but doesn't investigate whether TOP is true, whereas you set about investigating if it is true?
The request for further work: 18 is a lot of premises for a philosophical argument, and your analysis is very hedged. I recognise you don't want to claim too much but, as a reader who has thought about this far less than you, I would really appreciate you telling me what you think. Specifically, it would be useful to know which of the premises are the most crucial, in the sense of being least plausible. Presumably, some of 18 premises we don't need to worry about, and our attention can concentrate on a subset. Or, if you think all the premises are similarly plausible, that would be useful to know too!
Hello Bob and team. Looking forward to reading this. To check, are you planning to say anything explicitly about your approach to moral uncertainty? I can't see anything directly mentioned in 5., which is where I guessed it would go.
On that note Bob, you might recall that, a while back I mentioned to you some work I'm doing with a couple of other philosophers on developing an approach to moral uncertainty along these lines that will sometimes justify the practice of worldview diversification. That draft is nearly complete and your post series inspires me to try and get it over the line!
This report seems commendably thorough and thoughtful. Could you possibly spell out its implications for effect altruists though? I take it the conclusion is that humanity was most violent in the subsistence farming period, rather than before or after, but I'm not sure what to make of that. Presumably, it shows how violent people are changes quite radically in different contexts, so should I be reassured if, as seems likely, modern-type societies will continue? Returns to hunter-gathering and subsistence farming do not seem on the cards.
Sorry if I've missed something. But I reckoned that, if it was obvious to me, some others would missed it too.