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The third view of life-value is also a Person-Affecting View but swaps a Deprivationist account of the badness of death for the Time-Relative Interest Account (TRIA). I will refer to this combined view as ‘PATRIA’. I’ll motivate and explain the Time-Relative Interest Account and say why making cost-effectiveness comparisons on this view is problematically arbitrary.

On TRIA, the badness of death is a function of (a) the well-being that a person would have had if they’d lived (as with Deprivationism) and (b) the strength of the psychological connection that person has to their later self.⁴³ Whilst Deprivationism and TRIA agree it’s better to save a 20-year old than an 80-year old, they disagree on whether it’s better to save a foetus or a 20-year old. On TRIA, it’s better to save the 20-year old, despite the fact the foetus will (all else being equal) have 20 years more life to live, as that foetus will be greatly psychologically different from its later self.⁴⁴ As Nils Holtug explains:

41 The dogs I’ve known seem happier than the average human, but not the cats. I note that proponents of Mill's (1861) higher/lower pleasures distinguish may well think it is “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied” but it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss this topic.

42 Animal Charity Evaluators (2016)

43 See Liao (2007), McMahan, (2002, 2015)

44 It is an open question as to exactly which of the psychological relations matter: it could be memory, personality, or something else.

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After all, foetuses and infants usually have rather simple psychologies and thus few of the preferences, memories and character traits they will acquire later in life. Assuming an appropriately large discount rate, then, the Time-relative Interest Account implies that the 20-year-old will actually have a stronger interest in survival than the infant or foetus has.⁴⁵

There are questions both about how exactly this view is formulated, and whether it should be understood as a view of the badness of death. As Greaves states, when deciding how valuable saving a life is on TRIA, we need to know:

precisely which person-stages [i.e. the moments of a person’s life] count?

Are the relevant time-relative interests, for instance, only those of present person-stages (‘presentism’)? All actual person-stages (‘actualism’)? All person-stages who will exist regardless of how one resolves one’s decision (‘necessitarianism’)? All person-stages who would exist given some

resolution of one’s decision (‘possibilism’)? Or something else again?

(emphasis in original).⁴⁶

Greaves goes on to argue that both the presentist and actualist person-stage versions of TRIA are implausible (for reasons that need not detain us here) and suggests TRIA is not capturing the axiological badness of death, i.e. how bad it is in terms of final value, but rather our emotional reaction to how bad it seems when someone dies at different ages. This strikes me as correct.

However, even if this view is somehow confused, it is still useful to try to understand the implications it would have on the question to hand. Many people, when thinking

45 Holtug (2011)

46 Greaves (2019)

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about the value of saving children, discount the value of saving children’s lives relative to those of adults, because of TRIA-like reasoning. GiveWell, a charity evaluator, explicitly includes a discount for saving those under-5 vs over-5 years old in their cost-effectiveness model in.⁴⁷ So we will push on. For our purposes, it is sufficient to use the present-stage version of the view.

Figure 3.1. Value on TRIA of saving lives at different ages

Schematically then, on TRIA, the value of saving lives that are presently of different ages looks something like the curve that is represented in figure 3.1. It is more important to save those in their 20s/30s. Younger people will not be so psychologically connected to their later selves; older people will have relatively greater psychological stability but have less time left to live.

47 See GiveWell (2019a) at the ‘Moral Weights’ tab. Different GiveWell staff members have confirmed (personal conversation) that members of their organisation value saving under-5s less than over-5s as a result of TRIA-type concerns as well as the larger other-regarding effects of older deaths, e.g. the greater grief felt by parents.

Value of saving a life

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Two observations. First, as is already salient, TRIA discounts the value of saving children—they have a lesser psychological relation to their later selves than mature people do. Hence, saving children is far less valuable on TRIA that it is on the Deprivationist view.⁴⁸ Of course, thoughtful TRIA-advocates who choose to save children will already have incorporated this; I am not claiming anything surprising here.

Second, while we know saving 20-year-olds is better than saving 2-year-olds on TRIA (as that is the intuition the view is meant to capture), it’s unclear precisely how much better the former is than the latter. 10% better? Twice as good? 10 times as good? There seems to be plenty of room for disagreement about what the shape of the curve should be, and such questions need to be (somehow) settled before the TRIA-advocate could work how to do the most good.⁴⁹

In the previous section on PAD, we compared saving animals to saving children and said the former looked perhaps to be competitive with the latter. The natural question to ask is whether this is still the case on PATRIA. As saving children is less valuable than saving adults on PATRIA, we might think that saving animals’ lives is

48 Hilary Greaves raises the question of whether such intertheoretic comparisons make sense, not intertheoretic comparison are deemed problematic in the moral uncertainty literature – e.g. see Bykvist (2017) There doesn’t seem a problem here: to determine the badness of death, both Deprivationist and TRIA take as inputs the (sum of momentary) well-being the person doesn’t experience by dying early. The only difference is TRIA additional applies a psychological discounting before determining the axiological badness of the death. Hence, it’s easier to see how, if one switched from being a Deprivationist to being a TRIA advocate, it would be a simple matter to rescale the value of different outcomes.

49 For examples of such a disagreement, see Norheim (2019) who argues an ‘extreme’ version of TRIA. which holds we should save adults over children is untenable, although a more a ‘moderate’

one is acceptable. McMahan (2019), writing in the same volume, accepts the ‘extreme’ version. A further issue is that, as TRIA discounts the value of future well-being by how psychologically connected the present self is to that later person, this we also need the later lives of those who have reached adulthood: adults are not psychologically identical to their later selves either, whatever account of psychological connection we use (personality, memories, etc.). Hence, TRIA requires a further discount. As accounting for this complicates matters without changes the result, I leave it to the side.

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even better on PATRIA than on PAD. In fact, matters are more complicated. As McMahan observes, many people think, for TRIA-like reasons, that while preventing animal suffering is important, altering the lengths of animals lives’ is not important because:

They [i.e. animals] are not self-conscious, or are self-conscious only to a rudimentary degree, they are incapable of contemplating or caring about any-thing more than the immediate future. They do not, therefore, have desires or intentions or ambitions for the future that would be frustrated by death.⁵⁰

What seems to follow is that if one had an asymmetric Person-Affecting View and combined that with TRIA, sparing animals from living in factory farms would look relatively more cost-effective, compared to saving children, than it did on the asymmetric Person-Affecting View combined with Deprivationism. This is because saving children gets discounted but sparing bad animal lives does not.

Matters are (even) less clear on a symmetric Person-Affecting View that is combined with TRIA. Those who this view will want to discount donating to animal shelters—

there is little value in extending the lives of presently existing animals. As both donating to animal shelters and saving children are discounted, it is not clear, without specifying further details of the view (and empirical matters), which is supposed to be more cost-effective.

The reader may wonder why I have not attempted a more obvious comparison between saving children and an alternative that improves lives by increasing the

50 McMahan (2008)

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well-being of individuals whilst they are still alive.⁵¹ In chapter 7, I compare saving children against treating mental health. I do so assuming Deprivationism and using subjective well-being (SWB) scores, where individuals say how satisfied they are with their life on a 0-10 scale. The issue with the comparison, as I discuss there (chapter 7.3.2) is whether the life-saving or life-improving interventions are more cost-effective (as measured by their subjective well-being impact). This is highly sensitive to currently arbitrary decision about where to place the ‘neutral point’

equivalent to non-existence on the 0-10 scale. If it’s at 5 (it’s hard to believe it could be any higher) then treating mental health is more cost-effective.⁵² If the neutral point is 0, saving children is perhaps seven times more cost-effective. This analysis is in terms of Deprivationism, and saving children is less valuable on TRIA. It’s not clear saving children is seven times less valuable on TRIA, and hence the saving children-treating mental health cost-effectiveness comparison still turns on where the neutral point is.

I propose to leave matters here. I take the foregoing analysis to be sufficient to show it is not obvious whether saving children is the best option on PATRIA-type views.