John Broome

A common intuition suggests that it is less bad for an infant to die than for a young adult to die. This is puzzling because the infant has more life ahead of her than a young adult, so it seems she loses more when she dies. Jeff McMahan supports the common intuition and defends it by means of what he calls the “Time-Relative Interest Account” of the badness of death. I shall describe two possible interpretations of the Time-Relative Interest Account and raise a problem for each. Then I shall offer an alternative defense of the common intuition, which is an extension of the theory in population ethics known as “critical-level utilitarianism.”

The standard backward-induction reasoning in a game like the centipede assumes that the players maintain a common belief in rationality throughout the game. But that is a dubious assumption. Suppose the first player X didn't terminate the game in the first round; what would the second player Y think then? Since the backwards-induction argument says X should terminate the game, and it is supposed to be a sound argument, Y might be entitled to doubt X's rationality. Alternatively, Y might doubt that X believes Y is rational, or that X believes Y believes X is rational, or Y might have some higher-order doubt. X’s deviant first move might cause a breakdown in common belief in rationality, therefore. Once that goes, the entire argument fails. The argument also assumes that the players act rationally at each stage of the game, even if this stage could not be reached by rational play. But it is also dubious to assume that past irrationality never exerts a corrupting influence on present play. However, the backwards-induction argument can be reconstructed for the centipede game on a more secure basis.1 It may be implausible to assume a common belief in rationality throughout the game, however the game might go, but the argument requires less than this. The standard idealisations in game theory certainly allow us to assume a common belief in rationality at the beginning of the game. They also allow us to assume this common belief persists so long as no one makes an irrational move. That is enough for the argument to go through.

The main difficulty for the principle of personal good arises from egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is the view that equality between people is good. Equality is a relation between people. So it seems as though it will have to be a nonpersonal or interpersonal or suprapersonal good. This chapter outlines a utilitarian argument for equality. This argument is the point of departure for other egalitarian theories. It also describes two broad divisions of egalitarian thinking: the communal and the individualistic. The chapter shows that individualistic egalitarianism is consistent with the principle of personal good, and that communal egalitarianism is generally not. It further takes up the question of grounds: it asks why equality is good. Its answer is to ground egalitarianism in a theory of fairness. This theory supports individualistic egalitarianism against communal egalitarianism. So it supports the principle of personal good.

This volume is a selection of Broome's recent papers on normativity, rationality, and reasoning. It covers a variety of topics such as the meanings of 'ought', 'reason', and 'reasons'; the fundamental structure of normativity and the metaphysical priority of ought over reasons; the ownership - or agent-relativity - of oughts and reasons; the distinction between rationality and normativity; the notion of rational motivation; what characterizes the human activity of reasoning, and what is the role of normativity within it; the nature of preferences and of reasoning with preferences; and others. These papers extend the work presented in his book Rationality Through Reasoning but there is little overlap between their content and the book's. They develop further some themes and arguments from the book, and answer some questions that the book left unanswered.

ABSTRACT Philosophers often do not make as sharp a distinction as they should between rationality and normativity. Partly this is because the word ‘reason’ can be used to refer to either, and this leads to a confusion over meanings. This paper starts by clarifying the meanings of ‘normativity’ and ‘rationality’. It argues that it is a conceptual truth that rationality supervenes on the mind. Then it considers substantive arguments that purport to show there is no real distinction between rationality and normativity. Many philosophers give a reductive account of rationality in terms of reasons. In particular, many claim that rationality consists in responding correctly to reasons. Since responding correctly to reasons is the concern of normativity, this in effect identifies rationality with normativity. This paper denies that rationality is identical to normativity, by means of what I call a ‘quick objection’. The quick objection is that rationality supervenes on the mind whereas complying with normativity does not. I consider and reject some ways of responding to the quick objection, including an argument by Kiesewetter to the effect that normativity supervenes on the mind and one by Lord to the effect that rationality does not. I also consider a different, Kantian argument to the effect that rationality does not supervene on the mind.

Counting QALYs (quality adjusted life years) has been proposed as a way of deciding how resources should be distributed in the health service: put resources where they will produce the most QALYs. This proposal has encountered strong opposition. There has been a disagreement between some economists favouring QALYs and some philosophers opposing them. But the argument has, I think, mostly been at cross-purposes. Those in favour of QALYs point out what they can do, and those against point out what they can't. There need be no disagreement about this. What is needed is to sort out what is the proper domain of QALYs, and it may be possible to do this amicably. Then we may be able to get on with the more useful job of deciding how well QALYs perform within their domain. In this paper I shall try to accomplish the first task (sections II–IV), and make a start on the second (sections V–VIII).

Abstract:Standard lessons from economics tell us that an externality creates inefficiency, and that this inefficiency can be removed by internalizing the externality. This papers considers how successfully these lessons can be extended to intergenerational externalities such as emissions of greenhouse gas. For intergenerational externalities, the standard lessons involve comparisons between states whose populations of people differ, either in their identities or their numbers. Common notions of efficiency break down in these comparisons. This paper supplies a new notion of efficiency that allows the lessons to survive, but at the cost of reducing their practical significance.

This chapter considers whether the neutral level for extending life is a constant. It shows there are plausible grounds for thinking it may not be. However, it adopts the assumptions that it is constant as a default view. This leads to the standardized total principle for lives, which says that the value of a life is the total of temporal wellbeing contained in the life. This amounts to intrapersonal utilitarianism. The chapter considers the implication of this conclusion for the badness of death.

This chapter demonstrates how the assumptions made so far in the book imply that there is a single neutral level for existence. That is, there is a single level of wellbeing such that adding a person at that level is neither better nor worse than not adding her. It explains how this conclusion conflicts strongly with an intuition shared by many people: the ‘neutrality intuition’ that adding a person to the world’s population is generally ethically neutral. It uses examples such as the mere addition paradox. It outlines various ways in which the conflict with intuition might be circumvented.

This chapter distinguishes a notion of separability of lives from a stronger notion of separability of people, which takes into account the possibility of a person’s nonexistence. It defends separability of lives on the basis of the principle of personal good. It thereby opens up the people route to aggregation when the population of the world is constant. It assesses the principle of personal good, particularly considering its relation to the value of equality and its conflict with discounting for time.

This chapter starts to consider how wellbeing can be aggregated across a distribution. It describes two possible route to aggregation, called ‘the people route’ and the ‘snapshot route’. Each relies on a particular assumption of separability, which the chapter explains. The chapter examines the credibility of separability of times. It shows how separability of times conflicts with the value of longevity, and concludes that this principle cannot be relied on. It therefore rejects the snapshot route to aggregation.

This chapter opens the question of aggregating wellbeing across time to determine the value of a single person’s life. It explains the imperfect analogy between this sort of aggregation and aggregation across time to determine the overall value of a world. It assesses the principle of temporal good, the analogue of the principle of personal good. It shows there are plausible grounds for doubting the principle, which derive from various putative pattern goods. Nevertheless, this chapter eventually adopts the principle of temporal good as a default position. From this default position, it derives a same-lifetime addition theorem, which says that wellbeing is aggregated within a life additively.

This chapter considers how far what one ought to do when facing a decision of life and death is determined by the goodness of the distribution that will result. It defines, examines and assesses the principles of teleology and consequentialism in ethics. It compares normative theory with axiology. It considers how far a person’s lifetime wellbeing depends on all the wellbeing that comes to the person at times within her life, and how far the goodness of the world depends on the wellbeing of the people. It introduces the idea of pattern goods such as equality and longevity.