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A Life Worth LivingIn Weighing lives, Oxford University Press. 2004.This chapter defines the neutral value for extending life. This is the level of a person’s temporal wellbeing at which it is just worth the person’s continuing to live: extending the life is equally as good for the person as not extending it. The chapter examines and rejects the view that extending a person’s life is normally ethically neutral. This view is analogous to the neutrality intuition about adding a person to the population. It implies that every level of wellbeing is neutral. It may b…Read more
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311The wellbeing of future generationsIn The Oxford Handbook of Wellbeing and Public Policy, Oxford University Press. 2016.This chapter surveys some of the issues that arise in policy making when the wellbeing of future generations must be taken into account. It analyses the discounting of future wellbeing, and considers whether it is permissible. It argues that the effects of policy on the number of future people should not be ignored, and it considers what is an appropriate basis for setting a value on these effects. It considers the implications of the non-identity effect for intergenerational justice and for the…Read more
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3221Since the last ice age, when ice enveloped most of the northern continents, the earth has warmed by about five degrees. Within a century, it is likely to warm by another four or five. This revolution in our climate will have immense and mostly harmful effects on the lives of people not yet born. We are inflicting this harm on our descendants by dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We can mitigate the harm a little by taking measures to control our emissions of these gases, and to adapt …Read more
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165The value of living longerIn Sudhir Anand (ed.), Public Health, Ethics, and Equity, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 243--260. 2004.
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142Practical reasoningIn José Luis Bermúdez & Alan Millar (eds.), Reason and nature: essays in the theory of rationality, Oxford University Press. pp. 85--111. 2002.
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252Williams on OughtIn Ulrike Heuer & Gerald R. Lang (eds.), Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams, Oxford University Press Usa. 2012.In 2002, Bernard Williams delivered a lecture that revisited the arguments of his article 'Ought and moral obligation', published in his Moral Luck. The lecture attributed to the earlier article the thesis that there are no ‘personal’ or (as I put it) ‘owned’ oughts. It also rejected this thesis. This paper explains the idea of an owned ought, and supports Williams’s lecture in asserting that there are owned oughts. It also examines the question of how accurately Williams’s later lecture interpr…Read more
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90The unity of reasoningIn Simon Robertson (ed.), Spheres of reason: new essays in the philosophy of normativity, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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977Goodness is Reducible to Betterness the Evil of Death is the Value of LifeIn Peter Koslowski Yuichi Shionoya (ed.), The Good and the Economical: Ethical Choices in Economics and Management, Springer Verlag. 1993.Most properties have comparatives, which are relations. For instance, the property of width has the comparative relation denoted by `_ is wider than _'. Let us say a property is reducible to its comparative if any statement that refers to the property has the same meaning as another statement that refers to the comparative instead. Width is not reducible to its comparative. To be sure, many statements that refer to width are reducible: for instance, `The Mississippi is wide' means the same as `T…Read more
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562Incommensurable 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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33The 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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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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374Weighing 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.
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939Is Incommensurability Vagueness?In Ruth Chang (ed.), Incommensurability, incomparability, and practical reason, Harvard. 1997.
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95The Public and Private Morality of Climate ChangeThe Tanner Lectures on Human Values 32 3-20. 2013.The Tanner Lectures are a collection of educational and scientific discussions relating to human values. Conducted by leaders in their fields, the lectures are presented at prestigious educational facilities around the world
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237Reasoning with preferences?Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 59 183-208. 2006.Rationality requires certain things of you. It requires you not to have contradictory beliefs or intentions, not to intend something you believe to be impossible, to believe what obviously follows from something you believe, and so on. Its requirements can be expressed using schemata such as
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 |