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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A philosophical review of Open Philanthropy’s Cause Prioritisation Framework, published by MichaelPlant on July 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. 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: I suggest OP's framework would be greatly improved by clarifying and developing their stance on these philosophical issues. 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. 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. 1. Background Open Philanthropy’s mission is “to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us”. Since 2014, it has directed over $1.5 billion in grants and in 2022-23 it plans to give an additional $1 billion to evidence-based charities working in global health and development. Open Philanthropy (OP) has done an enormous amount of good. In particular, I want to praise them for the transparent way they communicate their reasoning so that others may learn from, use, and suggest improvements to it. For OP to do this is a public service, one that is almost unique in the wider world of philanthropic actors. In November 2021, OP published a blog post setting out an updated framework for making trade-offs between different types of interventions in their global health and wellbeing portfolio. In January 2022, Alexander Berger (co-CEO) and Peter Favaloro (Research Fellow) presented the framework at an online seminar hosted by the Centre for Global De...