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Dias 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.
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.