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5Representing 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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58A mistaken argument against the expected utility theory of rationalityTheory and Decision 18 (3): 313-318. 1985.
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298Do 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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55Précis of Rationality Through ReasoningPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (1): 200-203. 2015.
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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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517Incommensurable 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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82Synchronic 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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72Should 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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368Weighing 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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266Normative 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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91The 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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887Is Incommensurability Vagueness?In Ruth Chang (ed.), Incommensurability, incomparability, and practical reason, Harvard. 1997.
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249Reasoning 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
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27Reply to Jones-LeeEconomics and Philosophy 23 (3): 385-387. 2007.It is not the job of philosophy to give direct practical advice either to people or to governments. Nevertheless, moral philosophy is immensely significant in practical matters. It influences the way we think and act, but only slowly as it filters through the process of public debate. I hope Weighing Lives will have a practical influence, but it is not meant to be a directly practical guide
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61Deontology and EconomicsEconomics and Philosophy 8 (2): 269-282. 1992.In The Moral Dimension, Amitai Etzioni claims, as did Albert Hirschman in Morality and the Social Sciences, that people often act from moral motives, that economics needs to recognize this, and that it will be significantly changed by doing so. I agree, though I think the changes may be smaller than Etzioni believes – I shall be explaining why. But Etzioni goes further. He makes a specific claim about the sort of morality that motivates people: it is deontological. In this paper, I shall examine…Read more
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385General and personal good: Harsanyi’s contribution to the theory of valueIn Iwao Hirose & Jonas Olson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory, Oxford University Press. 2015.
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286RequirementsHommage À Wlodek; 60 Philosophical Papers Dedicated to Wlodek Rabinowicz. 2007.The object of this paper is to explore the intersection of two issues – both of them of considerable interest in their own right. The first concerns the role that feasibility considerations play in constraining normative claims – claims, say, about what we (individually and collectively) ought to do and to be. This issue has particular relevance for the confrontation of moral philosophy with economics (and social science more generally). The second issue concerns whether normative claims are to …Read more
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396MotivationTheoria 75 (2): 79-99. 2009.I develop a scheme for the explanation of rational action. I start from a scheme that may be attributed to Thomas Nagel in The Possibility of Altruism , and develop it step by step to arrive at a sharper and more accurate scheme. The development includes a progressive refinement of the notion of motivation. I end by explaining the role of reasoning within the scheme.
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 |