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377Is Rationality Normative?Disputatio 2 (23): 161-178. 2007.Rationality requires various things of you. For example, it requires you not to have contradictory beliefs, and to intend what you believe is a necessary means to an end that you intend. Suppose rationality requires you to F. Does this fact constitute a reason for you to F? Does it even follow from this fact that you have a reason to F? I examine these questions and reach a sceptical conclusion about them. I can find no satisfactory argument to show that either has the answer ‘yes’. I consider t…Read more
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171Equality versus priority: A useful distinctionEconomics and Philosophy 31 (2): 219-228. 2015.:Both egalitarianism and prioritarianism give value to equality. Prioritarianism has an additively separable value function whereas egalitarianism does not. I show that in some cases prioritarianism and egalitarianism necessarily have different implications: I describe two alternatives G and H such that egalitarianism necessarily implies G is better than H whereas prioritarianism necessarily implies G and H are equally good. I also raise a doubt about the intelligibility of prioritarianism.
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468Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming WorldW. W. Norton. 2012.Esteemed philosopher John Broome avoids the familiar ideological stances on climate change policy and examines the issue through an invigorating new lens. As he considers the moral dimensions of climate change, he reasons clearly through what universal standards of goodness and justice require of us, both as citizens and as governments. His conclusions—some as demanding as they are logical—will challenge and enlighten. Eco-conscious readers may be surprised to hear they have a duty to offset all…Read more
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73ReasonsIn R. Jay Wallace (ed.), Reason and value: themes from the moral philosophy of Joseph Raz, Oxford University Press. pp. 2004--28. 2004.
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696The badness of death and the goodness of lifeIn Fred Feldman, Ben Bradley & Jens Johansson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Death, Oxford University Press. 2012.
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47V*—FairnessProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91 (1): 87-102. 1991.John Broome; V*—Fairness, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 91, Issue 1, 1 June 1991, Pages 87–102, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/91.1.87.
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164Normativity in ReasoningPacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (4): 622-633. 2014.Reasoning is a process through which premise-attitudes give rise to a conclusion-attitude. When you reason actively you operate on the propositions that are the contents of your premise-attitudes, following a rule, to derive a new proposition that is the content of your conclusion-attitude. It may seem that, when you follow a rule, you must, at least implicitly, have the normative belief that you ought to comply with the rule, which guides you to comply. But I argue that to follow a rule is to m…Read more
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224The most important thing about climate changeIn Jonathan Boston, Andrew Bradstock & David L. Eng (eds.), Public policy: why ethics matters, Anue Press. pp. 101-16. 2010.This book chapter is not available in ORA, but you may download, display, print and reproduce this chapter in unaltered form only for your personal, non-commercial use or use within your organization from the ANU E Press website.
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6Representing an ordering when the population variesSocial Choice and Welfare 20 243-6. 2003.This note describes a domain of distributions of wellbeing, in which different distributions may have different populations. It proves a representation theorem for an ordering defined on this domain.
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61A mistaken argument against the expected utility theory of rationalityTheory and Decision 18 (3): 313-318. 1985.
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56Précis of Rationality Through ReasoningPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (1): 200-203. 2015.
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311Do not ask for moralityIn Adrian Walsh, Säde Hormio & Duncan Purves (eds.), The Ethical Underpinnings of Climate Economics, Routledge. pp. 9-21. 2016.
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35The welfare economics of populationSocial Choice and Welfare 2 221-34. 1985.Intuition suggests there is no value in adding people to the population if it brings no benefits to people already living: creating people is morally neutral in itself. This paper examines the difficulties of incorporating this intuition into a coherent theory of the value of population. It takes three existing theories within welfare economics - average utilitarianism, relativist utilitarianism, and critical-level utilitarianism - and considers whether they can satisfactorily accommodate the in…Read more
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555Incommensurable valuesIn Roger Crisp & Brad Hooker (eds.), Well-Being and Morality: Essays in Honour of James Griffin, Clarendon Press. pp. 21--38. 2000.Two options are incommensurate in value if neither is better than the other, and if a small improvement or worsening of one does not necessarily make it determinately better or worse than the other. If a person faces a sequence of choices between incommensurate options, she may end up with a worse options than she could have had, even though none of her choices are irrational. Yet it seems that rationality should save her from this bad outcome. This is the practical problem posed by incommensura…Read more
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83Synchronic requirements and diachronic permissionsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (5-6): 630-646. 2015.Reasoning is an activity of ours by which we come to satisfy synchronic requirements of rationality. However, reasoning itself is regulated by diachronic permissions of rationality. For each synchronic requirement there appears to be a corresponding diachronic permission, but the requirements and permissions are not related to each other in a systematic way. It is therefore a puzzle how reasoning according to permissions can systematically bring us to satisfy requirements
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43ResponsesPhilosophical Studies 173 (12): 3431-3448. 2016.This is a response to the comments of Boghossian, Cullity, Pettit and Southwood on my book Rationality Through Reasoning.
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73Should Social Preferences Be Consistent?Economics and Philosophy 5 (1): 7. 1989.Should social preferences conform to the principles of rationality we normally expect of individuals? Should they, for instance, conform to the consistency axioms of expected utility theory? This article considers one fragment of this question
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272Normative practical reasoning: John BroomeAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 75 (1). 2001.Practical reasoning is a process of reasoning that concludes in an intention. One example is reasoning from intending an end to intending what you believe is a necessary means: 'I will leave the next buoy to port; in order to do that I must tack; so I'll tack', where the first and third sentences express intentions and the second sentence a belief. This sort of practical reasoning is supported by a valid logical derivation, and therefore seems uncontrovertible. A more contentious example is norm…Read more
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372Weighing Goods: Equality, Uncertainty and TimeWiley-Blackwell. 1991.This study uses techniques from economics to illuminate fundamental questions in ethics, particularly in the foundations of utilitarianism. Topics considered include the nature of teleological ethics, the foundations of decision theory, the value of equality and the moral significance of a person's continuing identity through time.
John Broome
University Of Oxford
Australian National University
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University Of OxfordFaculty of PhilosophyProfessor
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Australian National UniversityProfessor (Part-time)
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Value Theory |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |