A philosophical review of Open Philanthropy’s Cause Prioritisation Framework
Summary
In this post, I undertake a philosophical review of Open Philanthropy’s Global Health and Wellbeing Cause Prioritisation Framework, the method they use to compare the value of different outcomes. In practice, the framework focuses on the relative value of just two outcomes, increasing income and adding years of life. This is a ‘red-team’ exercise, partially inspired by the EA forum contests on blogging and on critiques. My aim is to constructively critique something that is already good with the aim of improving it.
Here’s the prospectus. I sketch the various philosophical debates such a framework must take a position on. I note some of the options in each case and how choosing one rather than another may relatively alter the priorities. I attempt to identify the choices that the Open Philanthropy (OP) framework makes and conclude it is substantially unclear which positions they take or which arguments they accept. Specifically, to make the central trade-off between health and income OP implicitly appeals to different, opposing theories of wellbeing. Further, it is not obvious what assumptions the framework makes about population ethics and the badness of death, nor are any reasons given on these topics.
I make three main recommendations:
1. I suggest OP’s framework would be greatly improved by clarifying and developing their stance on these philosophical issues.
2. Given OP’s commitment to worldview diversification (putting significant resources behind every worldview they find plausible), I argue that OP is pushed to adopt more worldviews within the scope of its Global Health and Wellbeing Framework than the single one it adopts currently.
3. I suggest how OP might, in practice, expand their set of worldviews.
One crucial worldview I argue should be included – but which OP is currently sceptical of – is the use of subjective wellbeing measures (self-reports of happiness and life satisfaction) as a unified measure of value. I have previously advocated for an ‘SWB approach’ to cause prioritisation (see, for example, here and here). What’s novel here is the claim that using an SWB approach would be consistent with, indeed possibly even required by, OP’s worldview diversification approach. The simple thought is that it is plausible to think both that (1) happiness and life satisfaction matter morally and (2) people’s own ratings of their happiness and satisfaction are a credible way of measuring those feelings.
While this discussion focuses on OP’s framework, the issues I discuss here are very general and apply to any method which involves comparing the value of different outcomes. I consider OP’s framework as it is a prominent and concrete means of doing this.