Weighing Lives

by Broome, John

• ISBN13: 9780199243761
• ISBN10: 019924376X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-10-07
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

We are often faced with choices that involve the weighing of people's lives against each other, or the weighing of lives against other good things. These are choices both for individuals and for societies. A person who is terminally ill may have to choose between palliative care and moreaggressive treatment, which will give her a longer life but at some cost in suffering. We have to choose between the convenience to ourselves of road and air travel, and the lives of the future people who will be killed by the global warming we cause, through violent weather, tropical disease, andheat waves. We also make choices that affect how many lives there will be in the future: as individuals we choose how many children to have, and societies choose tax policies that influence people's choices about having children. These are all problems of weighing lives.How should we weigh lives? Weighing Lives develops a theoretical basis for answering this practical question. It extends the work and methods of Broome's earlier book Weighing Goods to cover the questions of life and death.Difficult problems come up in the process. In particular, Weighing Lives tackles the well-recognized, awkward problems of the ethics of population. It carefully examines the common intuition that adding people to the population is ethically neutral - neither a good nor a bad thing - but eventuallyconcludes this intuition cannot be fitted into a coherent theory of value. In the course of its argument, Weighing Lives examines many of the issues of contemporary moral theory: the nature of consequentialism and teleology; the transitivity, continuity, and vagueness of betterness; the quantitativeconception of wellbeing; the notion of a life worth living; the badness of death; and others.This is a work of philosophy, but one of its distinctive features is that it adopts some of the precise methods of economic theory (without introducing complex mathematics). Not only philosophers, but also economists and political theorists concerned with the practical question of valuing life,should find the book's conclusions highly significant to their work.

Author Biography

John Broome is White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford

Table of Contents

Weighing lives	1	(19)
Examples	1	(11)
The general problem	12	(8)
Notes	18	(2)
Some technical matters	20	(10)
The betterness ordering	20	(3)
Distributions described algebraically	23	(3)
The value function	26	(4)
Notes	29	(1)
Right and good	30	(20)
Teleology	31	(10)
Consequentialism	41	(2)
Distribution	43	(7)
Notes	48	(2)
Features of Goodness	50	(28)
The transitivity of betterness	50	(13)
General, personal, and temporal goodness	63	(5)
Relativity	68	(10)
Notes	76	(2)
Quantities of lifetime wellbeing	78	(21)
Expected utility theory	80	(6)
A cardinal scale of individual wellbeing	86	(5)
Comparing wellbeing between people	91	(8)
Notes	98	(1)
Quantities of temporal wellbeing	99	(5)
A cardinal scale of temporal wellbeing	99	(2)
Comparing wellbeing between times	101	(3)
Notes	103	(1)
Separability of times	104	(13)
Routes to aggregation	104	(2)
The objection to separability of times	106	(3)
Separatism	109	(1)
Dispersing the value of longevity	110	(3)
Can dispersion be successful?	113	(4)
Notes	116	(1)
Separability of lives	117	(15)
Separability of people and separability of lives	117	(3)
The argument for separability of lives	120	(6)
Discounting for time	126	(3)
The people route to aggregation	129	(1)
The rectangular field assumption	130	(2)
Notes	131	(1)
Same-number aggregation	132	(8)
The same-number addition theorem	132	(6)
Introduction to different-number aggregation	138	(2)
Notes	139	(1)
The neutral level for existence	140	(11)
A single neutral level of wellbeing	140	(3)
The intuition of neutrality	143	(3)
Counterexamples to the principle of equal existence	146	(5)
Notes	149	(2)
Nonstandard betterness	151	(13)
Intransitive betterness	151	(1)
Conditional betterness	152	(5)
Relative betterness	157	(7)
Notes	162	(2)
Indeterminate betterness	164	(23)
Incommensurateness	165	(6)
Vague betterness versus incommensurateness	171	(4)
Supervaluation	175	(4)
The vague value of existence	179	(4)
The way forward	183	(4)
Notes	185	(2)
Separability of people	187	(12)
The argument to this point	187	(2)
What the neutral level may depend on	189	(2)
Average wellbeing	191	(6)
Numbers of people	197	(2)
Notes	198	(1)
The standardized total principle	199	(16)
Derivation of the principle	199	(3)
Vagueness and the intuition of neutrality, again	202	(6)
What is the neutral level?	208	(2)
Objections	210	(5)
Notes	214	(1)
Same-lifetime aggregation	215	(18)
Intertemporal aggregation	216	(2)
The principle of temporal good	218	(5)
Other values	223	(6)
Temporal impartiality	229	(4)
Notes	232	(1)
A life worth living	233	(8)
A neutral level for continuing to live	233	(2)
Is death typically neutral?	235	(6)
Notes	240	(1)
The value of a life	241	(13)
Is the neutral level for continuing to live constant?	241	(7)
The standardized total principle for lives	248	(1)
The badness of death	249	(5)
Notes	252	(2)
The theory of weighing lives	254	(11)
The integrated total principle	254	(2)
Separatism and complete utilitarianism	256	(4)
What next?	260	(5)
Notes	264	(1)
Bibliography	265	(8)
Index	273