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shminux comments on Compartmentalizing: Effective Altruism and Abortion - Less Wrong
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Sorry, haven't read the whole post, only commenting on one part. If your goal is to maximize QALY and given that happiness depends only very weakly on the living conditions, it is nearly always true that
and you end up with the repugnant conclusion of populating the Earth to capacity (and maximizing this capacity by any means possible). The standard solution is not a calculational one, but rather agreeing on where the Schelling point lies. Which factors out the EA-related considerations and brings you back to square one, arguing about the fetal personhood.
Not merely saving them, but creating them and bringing them to term. Every unoccupied womb is an idle QALY factory going to waste.
Doesn't that argument prove too much, namely that murder is acceptable?
Choosing to not create a new person is not the same as killing an existing one.
How is this different from a QALY point of view?
It's not, and that is why QALY is a too simplistic point of view.
At the very least because an already-born person will almost always leave survivors aggrieved and/or materially harmed by the act, while aborted fetuses often do not.
So what about killing hermits?
If they're a truly isolated hermit, that distinction would presumably no longer apply, but the world is pretty short on truly isolated hermits.
I think you probably could kill and replace an isolated hermit in a QALY-neutral way (you'd probably need a fairly unhappy person to keep it QALY neutral even,) whereas with social connections in the equation, if you were trying to kill and replace non-hermits in a QALY neutral way, you'd ultimately end up having to do it to everyone.
I agree but in isolation in such an population ethics context it has insufficient elaboration. Some might disagree at least in theory.
How?
Yeah I think the repugnant conclusion is not actually very repugnant; it just seems so because of scope insensitivity.
But I would stress that the argument I make doesn't rely on your having a goal of maximizing QALYs. You might assign some credence to other moral views that take a stance on aborting fetuses; deontology, for example, or even just 'maximize the QALYs of everyone who is already alive.'
Not very repugnant? Are you saying that you would support impregnating every fertile female, voluntarily or forcibly, if you expect this to maximize QALY? Or do you qualify it by saying "maximize the QALYs of everyone who is already alive"? Then you are back to the definition of when to count fetus as alive, and this is again a Schelling point argument, EA or no EA.
No, but that's not what the repugnant conclusion is. The RC is about the desirability of an end-state - highly populous worlds could be very desirable and yet some methods for achieving such worlds still be morally impermissible. There can be side-constraints, to use Nozick's (?) terminology, or other values at stake.
You might find [this article] on population ethics interesting.
I think there are many plausible approaches, including a consequentialism-of-rights. I included "maximize the QALYs of everyone who is already alive" because I wanted to show that the argument applied to many different systems, but I do not actually think that system is very plausible.
I agree that many arguments can ultimately be reduced to arguments about the moral status of fetuses - in fact I say so in the OP!
But here I must disagree. It seems plausible that there is actually a fact of the matter whether one has moral value / how much value one has. I don't think this is particularly controversial, except I guess to some anti-realists.
Pretty much what I was going to comment. I would add that even if he somehow were able to avoid having to accept the more general Repugnant Conclusion, he would certainly have to at least accept that if abortion is wrong in these grounds, not having a child is (nearly) equally wrong on the same grounds.
This is not an objection if you happen to accept the "repugnant" conclusion, as I do.
I haven't read all the comments to this post, and I am new to LW generally, so if I say anything that's been gone over, bear with me.
The argument that abortion is bad due to the QALYs has certain inherent assumptions. First is that there's "room" in the system for additional people. If the addition of a new person subtracts from the quality of life of others, then that has to be factored.
Another aspect that must be factored into this analysis is somewhat more obscure. "Moral hazard". "Slippery slope" is a fallacy, however, as noted <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/ase/schelling_fences_on_slippery_slopes/">here</a> under certain conditions, it's a caution to be taken seriously. If abortion is banned because it reduces total QALYs, then the precedent has been set for authoritative intervention in personal choices for the purpose of increasing total QALYs. it would then make sense to, for instance, ban eating beef due to the inefficiency, and health consequences of it. And etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Depending on how the adjustment for "quality" is calculated.
And this gets into the more important question when pondering QALYs, What calculus are we using for the "Quality adjustment"? What's the coefficient adjustment for depression? How do you factor in personal differences? Is a year of the life of a man with a mean wife worth less than that of a man with a nice wife? Does "Pleasure" factor in? How? Fried food is pleasurable to many people, consuming it increases their instantaneous quality of life, but has some long-term costs in the "years".
Additionally, the quality of life hit that is suffered from banning abortion (and taking a commensurate increase in adoptions) is not just to the mother. Every human in that system takes a quality of life hit due to the chilling effect that it will likely have on the sexual climate, the additional concerns that will inevitably be present on every act of sexual congress (A full term pregnancy is a far greater consequence than an abortion). If our goal is to maximize QALY, then QALY must include all of the variables of life.
Lacking such comprehensive (and impossible) indepth, individual analysis, then it would be possible to, for instance, maximize QALY by essentially putting everyone in prison, feeding them an "optimal life extension diet" (which I assure you is not enjoyable), and keeping them away from toxins/hazards... But a population on full-time suicide watch seems suboptimal to me.