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You misread my comment. I was worried you’d take this route; that’s why I put my last paragraph in. It’s to show the reasoning even though I’m aware the example has flaws. I’m too tired to come up with one that will be easier to understand.

It’s an appeal to emotion, but it’s not used in place of an argument. That is, it’s not fallacious. You seem to be suggesting that the writer is using the emotional bit in place of an argument demonstrating that such actions do actually kill children. If you think that that’s what’s happening, you’re misunderstanding the point. That is not at all what he’s saying. The “scientific” argument is a premise on which his argument relies. You can dispute that premise, but he’s not arguing that this premise is true using an appeal to emotion.

Well, lucky for me they wrote it down.

>Two can play at that your game:

I think you presumed my game was taking the words so literally as to sacrifice their meaning for some semantic argument.

You were wrong. When the author said "it corrects this gap" what they meant was, "it attempts to correct this gap", which is what I was arguing against.

>Would that be so bad?

Yes. Because it reframes the entire conversation toward the human instinct to use an abundance of caution around their offspring. Including children in the narrative, such as "poisoning our drinking water with X amount of toxin Y which is over Z legal amount is bad for everyone, but even more so for children as they're smaller and more susceptible to lower levels of toxins than adults" is fine. It has all the elements required. Amounts, legal limits, some scientific, quantifiable data that can be argued against. Simply saying "voting for this bill will murder children" is an appeal to emotion. It offers no evidence that can be argued with and presumes you're either in favor of murdering children or you're on the side of the author.

This isn't established by the author, it's just another Woke Kult pamphlet talking point put out by Marxists.

>A) that saving more childrens' lives is preferable to saving fewer, B) that redirecting more wealth to children's charities will save the lives of more children

This is the appeal to emotion. There's no argument that connects those two things. As I said in another discussion in this thread, you may as well couch this decision in terms of

A. Saving children's lives is preferable to not.

B. Voting Republican saves more children's lives.

And then just arguing that saying "vote Republican to save children's lives" is an effective way to convince people to vote Republican. The inference being that voting Republican is the way to save children's lives.

>For instance, even if it’s true that such amount of CO2 will kill Y many children, you may not realize this if the information isn’t given to you in a form that will make this apparent to you.

The argument being made is that CO2 will kill children, when there's no indication that this is the case at all. While one might weigh purchasing a product vs releasing CO2 (which is a very strange way of looking at it, as the product is already created), we bypass the scientific argument around how CO2 kills children and instead appeal to your emotions.

You may as well say "For every time you vote Democrat, you kill a child. How many children are you willing to kill to satisfy your own need to feel like a social justice warrior hero?"

it's an appeal to emotion.

The funniest part is that this article is trying to make an economic argument without even pausing to consider that since aid programs are underfunded, they are obviously serving the most easily saved children first.

Each child doesn't cost exactly the same amount of money to save, and the current estimates presumably are based on trying to save the most easily saved children.

I bet you that number doubles or triples or quadruples real fast, once you actually start seriously spending money on it.

Of course, absolutely - that's the point of arguments like this. They all, ultimately, boil down to well paid stooges trying to convince you that you have an equal share of culpability and blame for the horrors of the world.

The goal of this article isn't to convince you to buy one less coffee. It's not to convince you to go on less cruises. The goal of this article is to make it so the next time you read an article about how Apple is forging iPhones directly out of the bones of orphans and kittens or whatever, you just go "meh but I can't complain or I'd be a hypocrite", as if your morning cup of coffee has made you morally equal to a board of directors who have done the math and figured out that if they throw literal babies into a literal wood chipper, they'll sell 2% more iPhones next year.

It seems like emotional blackmail - using fear, intimidation, obligation, duty, guilt, and shame for coercive control.

To be fair, hospital pricing is kind of a game where the hospital says, for a completely fictional example, that fixing the valve in my heart costs 327k dollars. And then the insurance says, nah, we'll give you 20k. And the hospital says okay.

So really it cost 20k but the hospital inflated the cost so that, should I turn out to be a deadbeat, then can deduct 327k as a loss or charity or whatever.

Determining the actual cost of saving a life is difficult work.

Wow. That was one of the most laughable articles I've ever read. I'm fluctuating between disgust and awe. Feels strange. Intentions of the author aside, this article is pure art — an absolute satirical masterpiece.

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>According to the meta-charity GiveWell, the most effective charities can save a child’s life for between 3 and 5,000 US dollars. One way of understanding this figure is that whenever you consider spending that amount of money, one of the things you would be choosing not to spend it on is saving a child’s life. Take the median of the GiveWell figures: $4,000. I propose that prices for all goods and services should be listed in the universal alternative currency of percentage of a Child’s Life Not Saved (%CLNS), as well as their regular prices in Euros, dollars, or whatever

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Funny, because same Givewell, opposes an “explicit expected-value” (EEV) approach to giving/donation, and believe it to be intuitively problematic. Their conclusion states that "Any approach to decision-making that relies only on rough estimates of expected value – and does not incorporate preferences for better-grounded estimates over shakier estimates – is flawed."

Some of their points:

>- There seems to be nothing in EEV that penalizes relative ignorance or relatively poorly grounded estimates, or rewards investigation and the forming of particularly well grounded estimates. If I can literally save a child I see drowning by ruining a $1000 suit, but in the same moment I make a wild guess that this $1000 could save 2 lives if put toward medical research, EEV seems to indicate that I should opt for the latter. >- Because of this, a world in which people acted based on EEV would seem to be problematic in various ways. > - In such a world, it seems that nearly all altruists would put nearly all of their resources toward helping people they knew little about, rather than helping themselves, their families and their communities. I believe that the world would be worse off if people behaved in this way, or at least if they took it to an extreme. (There are always more people you know little about than people you know well, and EEV estimates of how much good you can do for people you don’t know seem likely to have higher variance than EEV estimates of how much good you can do for people you do know. Therefore, it seems likely that the highest-EEV action directed at people you don’t know will have higher EEV than the highest-EEV action directed at people you do know.) > - In such a world, when people decided that a particular endeavor/action had outstandingly high EEV, there would (too often) be no justification for costly skeptical inquiry of this endeavor/action. For example, say that people were trying to manipulate the weather; that someone hypothesized that they had no power for such manipulation; and that the EEV of trying to manipulate the weather was much higher than the EEV of other things that could be done with the same resources. It would be difficult to justify a costly investigation of the “trying to manipulate the weather is a waste of time” hypothesis in this framework. Yet it seems that when people are valuing one action far above others, based on thin information, this is the time when skeptical inquiry is needed most. And more generally, it seems that challenging and investigating our most firmly held, “high-estimated-probability” beliefs – even when doing so has been costly – has been quite beneficial to society. >- Related: giving based on EEV seems to create bad incentives. EEV doesn’t seem to allow rewarding charities for transparency or penalizing them for opacity: it simply recommends giving to the charity with the highest estimated expected value, regardless of how well-grounded the estimate is. Therefore, in a world in which most donors used EEV to give, charities would have every incentive to announce that they were focusing on the highest expected-value programs, without disclosing any details of their operations that might show they were achieving less value than theoretical estimates said they ought to be.

For their full reasoning and objections, here's the article: Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally (even when they’re unbiased).

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Back to the posted article...

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>The justification for this would be to fix a gap in the way the price system functions. Normally we make our consumption decisions entirely in terms of a consideration of how much we want something and how much we can afford, a matter of prudence only. As economists have analysed, such exercises in constrained maximisation are all we need do to enjoy a flourishing economy since by responding to prices we automatically take into account the social cost to others of resources being used for what we want rather than for something else (so long as some wise and non-self-interested government steps in to correct for externalities).

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Ah, the rational choice theory of economics. The theory that assumes people always act rationally, are emotionally exempt, culturally homogenous, identical in values, and remain in a state of conscious logical processing unaffected by unconscious impulses or natural biases. Presented as a fact that underlies consumption, and not just a gross simplification used to create economic models of questionable real-world value.

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>Lots of people have nice-sounding ideas about what we should do or care about to make the world better. Unfortunately many of their proposals display a lack of quantitative thinking, which makes their proposals very hard to evaluate.

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Yeah, this idea doesn't sound nice at all, and it also displays a lack of quantitative thinking. However, I will say, it is very very easy to evaluate.

TIL the global economy kills more poor children than there are total children in the world

Ironically, you actually make a better argument than the entire article linked - no offense intended.

We do spend absolutely bonkers amounts of money keeping individual people alive, and it is probably true that this is very inefficient on a global scale. But of course, it's much easier to poke at "luxuries" like coffee or vacations than it is to point out that the quality of medical care that some of us are lucky to have access to is so much better than the rest of the world that we might as well live on different planets.

That is not what this person is saying. They are saying that even though the argument relies on premises that you may disagree with, your issue should be with the premises and not the validity of the argument since there is no fallacy being committed.

“Appeals to emotion can lead us to preferable outcomes” appears to be the author’s conclusion and it’s arrived at without employing an appeal to emotion fallacy despite the fact that the conclusion is about appeals to emotion.

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It’s easy to assume someone may be taking an opposing view of what you say on Reddit these days, given the sheer level of trolling you run across, I made a hasty conclusion.

I’m probably too dumb for this sub myself, but I like to think I’m at least a little bit intellectual on occasion.

> In philosophy, we call this a false dichotomy

Who is "we"? Do you presume to speak for all philosophers?

No worries! It was probably too “low effort” for this sub to be completely honest.

My bad. Misunderstood your point.

Yes. Sorry, I was just ridiculing the concept by raising the fact that the sum total cost to “save all children” is actually within reach (it’s about 25% more than the US federal governments current year-to-date expenditure).

I’d love for it to be that simple.

But no complex system is, and the onus is on all of us to contribute to resolving the problem, and since the true ability to control public policy, on a global scale, is effectively out of the hands of the overwhelmingly vast majority of us because of competing groups that want the power to manipulate everything in their favor, we are basically screwed.

It actually isn’t. It isn’t using an appeal to emotion in place of the argument. It’s appealing to emotion to communicate the costs of our choices in a way that people can understand intuitively.

When you make a choice, you may not understand its full weight because the costs are too abstract. “If you buy this X pounds of carbon dioxide is released” or whatever. Even though that information may be 100% correct, it may not be in a form such that the consequences of your actions will be communicated to you in a way that you natively understand. For instance, even if it’s true that such amount of CO2 will kill Y many children, you may not realize this if the information isn’t given to you in a form that will make this apparent to you.

Of course this example I’ve used is contrived and the causal mechanism for unloading carbon isn’t simply buying a product, but I think the point I’ve made should be clear enough.

Great idea. Great way to desensitize people. “I’ll get that one, it’s just 10 dead kids more and I want to splurge.”

I say we put this nonsense to bed, there are 2.2bn children on earth and for the very reasonable price of $4k per head (or $8.8 trillion) we can save them all and return our focus to less important matters.