Clasificación de los sistemas de captación de agua de lluvia

The first view of life-value combines the Totalism about population axiology with Deprivationism about the badness of death.¹² On Totalism, the value of a state of affairs is the sum of lifetime well-being of everyone who will ever live.¹³ Importantly, Totalists hold creating a new life can be good/bad, and the value of doing so is equal to the well-being of the person who is created (assuming effects on others are equal).

This contrasts with the other three views I discuss, which hold there is no value in creating new lives.¹⁴ On Deprivationism, the badness of your death is the sum of well-being you would have had, had you lived.¹⁵ Deprivationists will hold it’s more

12 While, for simplicity, I refer only to Totalism, what I say this in section could, I think, be said of all population axiologies that give weight to all possible lives, i.e. Critical Level views, Variable value views and Averagism. For a summary of the different population axiologies see Greaves (2017)

13 Population axiologies can (of course) include goods besides well-being. I follow the simplifying norm in the literature and restrict the analysis to well-being.

14 Or, at least, no value in creating happy lives, those with net positive lifetime well-being. I return to this later.

15 If more explanation is required: I take Deprivationism to hold that lifetime well-being is the unweighted sum of all the individual instances of momentary well-being (i.e. well-being at a time).

As such, Deprivationism uses the same aggregation method to get from momentary well-being to lifetime well-being that Totalism uses to get from lifetime well-being to overall betterness. I note that Bramble (2018) argues there is no such thing as momentary well-being and lifetime well-being is the only genuine kind of well-being.

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valuable to save a 20-year-old than the 60-year-old as the former is deprived of more well-being than the latter, and this is more valuable by exactly the difference in the sums of well-being lost. I will (unimaginatively) call this Totalist Deprivationism (‘TD’)

It is not obvious, however, that saving children is the best way to do good on this view. One alternative is that, as TDs value all possible lives (not just the present generation), they should instead be putting their efforts towards preventing existential risks, that is, risks “that threate[n] the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development.”¹⁶ Beckstead summarises the steps in Bostrom’s Astronomical Waste argument as follows:

1. The expected size of humanity's future influence is astronomically great.

2. If the expected size of humanity's future influence is astronomically great, then the expected value of the future is astronomically great.

3. If the expected value of the future is astronomically great, then what matters most is that we maximize humanity’s long-term potential.

4. Some of our actions are expected to reduce existential risk in not-ridiculously-small ways.

5. If what matters most is that we maximize humanity’s future potential and some of our actions are expected to reduce existential risk in not-ridiculously-small ways, what it is best to do is primarily determined by how our actions are expected to reduce existential risk.

16 Bostrom (2003) Not existential risks are not the same as extinction risks: the former are a wider category that includes concern for non-extinction outcomes that could reduce ‘future development’.

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6. Therefore, what it is best to do is primarily determined by how our actions are expected to reduce existential risk. ¹⁷

To make the expected value of the future plain, here’s a quote from Bostrom:

Suppose that about 10^{^10} biological humans could be sustained around an average star. Then the Virgo Supercluster could contain 10^{^23} biological humans. This corresponds to a loss of potential equal to about 10^¹⁴ potential human lives per second of delayed colonization.¹⁸

Bostrom’s particular concern is the threat that emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, pose to sentient life.¹⁹ As such, so the thinking goes, those who care about all possible lives should focus their efforts on reducing existential risks, rather than anywhere else, and that includes saving children.

To make the scenario both more concrete and less reliant on lives in the very far future, let’s look at the value of saving humanity if it lives only 100,000 years longer (a fraction of the time it could exist for). Assuming there are 7 billion people per century, then means 7 trillion people’s lives are at stake. Suppose there is a 1% risk of extinction over this century (i.e. the risk this year is 0.0001, the same the next, etc.), and none thereafter.²⁰ Assume that there is some project that would cost $1bn per year, such as an asteroid tracking and deflection programme, and this would reduce the risk proportionally by 1%, thus, if we spent a billion each year this century, the cumulative probability of extinction declines from 1% to 0.99%.²¹ If we spent $1bn this year, that would lead to the existence of 70 million more lives in

17 (Beckstead, 2013)

18 Bostrom (2003)

19 Bostrom (2014)

20 This model is partially adapted from one proposed by Lewis (2018)

21 (Beckstead, 2013) ch.3 argues asteroid deflection would be more valuable that ‘proximate benefits’

e.g. saving children, but does not offer a quantified comparison.

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expectation. Assuming that the expected value of financial contributions is linear, then, if we scale the numbers down, $10,000 put towards an existential risk reduction organisation would create 700 lives, in expectation.

According to GiveWell, the Against Malaria Foundation saves, in expectation, slightly more than 2 lives of under-5-year-olds for $10,000.²² Let’s assume for simplicity this save two lives and saving these lives is as good, in terms of the individual value related to those lives, as creating 2 new people that live their entire lives. Assuming, again for simplicity, all human lives now and in the future have the same lifetime well-being, then preventing existential risks—‘saving humanity’—

seems to be over 300 times more cost-effective than saving children.

At the first pass, then, saving children does not seem the most cost-effective option on this view. That suffices for our purposes, hence a longer discussion is outside the scope of this analysis.²³