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MugaSofer comments on Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and Meta-Charity - Less Wrong
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What should be objective grounds for such a multiplier? Not all suffering is valued equally. Excluding self-suffering (which is so much subjectively different) from the discussion, I would value the suffering of my child as more important than the suffering of your child. And vice versa.
So, for any valuation that would make sense to me (so that I would actually use that method to make decisions), there should be some difference between multipliers for various beings - if the average homo sapiens would be evaluated with a coefficient of 1, then some people (like your close relatives or friends) would be >1, and some would be <1. Animals (to me) would clearly be <1 as illustrated by a simple dilemma - if I had to choose to kill a cow to save a random man, or to kill a random man to save a cow, I'd favor the man in all cases without much hesitation.
So an important question is, what should be a reasonable basis to quantitatively compare a human life versus (as an example) cow lifes - one-to-ten? one-to-thousand? one-to-all-the-cows-in-the-world? Frankly, I've got no idea. I've given it some thought but I can't imagine a way how to get to an order of magnitude estimate that would feel reasonable to me.
To be clear, you are arguing that this is a bias to be overcome, yes?
Scope insensitivity?
No, I'm not arguing that this is a bias to overcome - if I have to choose wether to save my child or your child, the unbiased rational choice is to save my child, as the utility (to me) of this action is far greater.
I'm arguing that this is a strong counterexample to the assumption that all entities may be treated as equals in calculating "value of entity_X's suffering to me". They are clearly not equal, they differ by order(s) of magnitude.
"general value of entity_X's suffering" is a different, not identical measurement - but when making my decisions (such as the original discussion on what charities would be the most rational [for me] to support) I don't want to use the general values, but the values as they apply to me.
... oh.
That seems ... kind of evil, to be honest.
OK, then I feel confused.
Regarding " if I have to choose wether to save my child or your child, the unbiased rational choice is to save my child, as the utility (to me) of this action is far greater" - I was under impression that this would be a common trait shared by [nearly] all homo sapiens. Is it not so and is generally considered sociopathic/evil ?
Consider: if you attach higher utility to your child's life than mine, then even if my child has a higher chance of survival you will choose your child and leave mine to die.
Not true as a general statement, not if you're maximizing your expected utility gain.
Also, "if"? One often attaches utility based on ... attachment. Do you think there's more than, say, 0.01 parents per 100 that would not value their own child over some other child? Are most all parents "evil" in that regard?
I believe the technical term is "biased".
In the same way that I'm "biased" towards yogurt-flavored ice-cream. You can call any preference you have a "bias", but since we're here mostly dealing with cognitive biases (a different beast altogether), such an overloading of a preference-expression with a negatively connotated failure-mode should really be avoided.
What's your basis for objecting against utility functions that are "biased" (you introduced the term "evil") in the sense of favoring your own children over random other children?
No, I'm claiming that parents don't actually have a special case in their utility function, they're just biased towards their kids. Since parents are known to be biased toward their kids generally, and human morality is generally consistent between individuals, this seems a reasonable hypothesis.
Another situation that has some parallels and may be relevant to the discussion.
Helping starving kids is Good - that's well understood. However, my upbringing and current gut feeling says that this is not unconditional. In particular, feeding starving kids is Good if you can afford it; but feeding other starving kids if that causes your own kids to starve is not good, and would be considered evil and socially unacceptable. i.e., that goodness of resource redistribution should depend on resource scarcity; and that hurting your in-group is forbidden even with good intentions.
It may be caused by the fact that I'm partially brought up by people that actually experienced starvation and have had their relatives starve to death (WW2 aftermath and all that), but I'd guess that their opinion is more fact-based than mine and that they definitely had put more thought into it than I have, so until/if I analyze it more, I probably should accept that prior.
That is so - though it depends on the actual chances; "much higher chance of survival" is different than "higher chance of survival".
But my point is that:
a) I might [currently thinking] rationally desire that all of my in-group would adopt such a belief mode - I would have higher chances of survival if those close to me prefer me to a random stranger. And "belief-sets that we want our neighbors to have" are correlated with what we define as "good".
b) As far as I understand, homo sapiens do generally actually have such an attitude - evolutionary psychology research and actual observations when mothers/caretakers have had to choose kids in fires/etc.
c) Duty may be a relevant factor/emotion. Even if the values were perfectly identical (say, the kids involved would be twins of a third party), if one was entrusted to me or I had casually accepted to watch him, I'd be strongly compelled to save that one first, even if the chances of survival would (to an extent) suggest otherwise. And for my own kids, naturally, I have a duty to take care of them unlike 99.999% other kids - even if I wouldn't love them, I'd still have that duty.
My point is that duty, while worth encouraging throughout society, is screened off by most utilitarian calculations; as such it is a bias if, rationally, the other choice is superior.