•  3624
    Pure time preference in intertemporal welfare economics
    Economics and Philosophy 33 (3): 441-473. 2017.
    Several areas of welfare economics seek to evaluate states of affairs as a function of interpersonally comparable individual utilities. The aim is to map each state of affairs onto a vector of individual utilities, and then to produce an ordering of these vectors that can be represented by a mathematical function assigning a real number to each. When this approach is used in intertemporal contexts, a central theoretical question concerns the evaluative weight to be applied to utility coming at d…Read more
  •  2323
    Descriptive versus Prescriptive Discounting in Climate Change Policy Analysis
    Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy 15 957-977. 2017.
    This paper distinguishes between five different approaches to social discount rates in climate change economics, criticizes two of these, and explains how the other three are to some degree mutually compatible. It aims to shed some new light on a longstanding debate in climate change economics between so-called “descriptivists” and “prescriptivists” about social discounting. The ultimate goal is to offer a sketch of the conceptual landscape that makes visible some important facets of the debate …Read more
  •  2305
    Beneficence, Justice, and Health Care
    Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 24 (1): 27-49. 2014.
    This paper argues that societal duties of health promotion are underwritten (at least in large part) by a principle of beneficence. Further, this principle generates duties of justice that correlate with rights, not merely “imperfect” duties of charity or generosity. To support this argument, I draw on a useful distinction from bioethics and on a somewhat neglected approach to social obligation from political philosophy. The distinction is that between general and specific beneficence; and the a…Read more
  •  1954
    Capabilities versus Resources
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 10 (4): 151-171. 2013.
    What is the correct metric of distributive justice? Proponents of the capability approach claim that distributive metrics should be articulated in terms of individuals’ effective abilities to achieve important and worthwhile goals. Defenders of resourcism, by contrast, maintain that metrics should instead focus on the distribution of external resources. This debate is now more than three decades old, and it has produced a vast and still growing literature. The present paper aims to provide a fre…Read more
  •  1467
    Is There a Sacrifice-Free Solution to Climate Change?
    Ethics, Policy and Environment 18 (1): 68-78. 2015.
    John Broome claims that there is a sacrifice-free solution to climate change. He says this is a consequence of elementary economics. After explaining the economic argument in somewhat more detail than Broome, I show that the argument is unsound. A main problem with it stems from Derek Parfit's ‘nonidentity effect.’ But there is hope, since the nonidentity effect underwrites a more philosophical yet more plausible route to a sacrifice-free solution. So in the end I join Broome in asking economist…Read more
  •  1017
    Relevance and Non-consequentialist Aggregation
    Utilitas 26 (4): 385-408. 2014.
    Interpersonal aggregation involves the combining and weighing of benefits and losses to multiple individuals in the course of determining what ought to be done. Most consequentialists embrace thoroughgoing interpersonal aggregation, the view that any large benefit to each of a few people can be morally outweighed by allocating any smaller benefit to each of many others, so long as this second group is sufficiently large. This would permit letting one person die in order to cure some number of mi…Read more
  •  824
    Efficiency and Equity in Health: Philosophical Considerations
    Encyclopedia of Health Economics Vol. 1. 2014.
    Efficiency and equity are central concepts for the normative assessment of health policy. Drawing on the work of academic philosophers and philosophically sophisticated economists, this article identifies important philosophical questions implicated by the notions of efficiency and equity and then summarizes influential answers to them. Promising avenues for further philosophical research are also highlighted, especially in the context of health equity and its elusive ethical foundations.
  •  750
    Health Inequalities and Relational Egalitarianism
    In Mara Buchbinder, Michele R. Rivkin-Fish & Rebecca L. Walker (eds.), Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice: New Conversations across the Disciplines, University of North Carolina Press. 2016.
    Much of the philosophical literature on health inequalities seeks to establish the superiority of one or another conception of luck egalitarianism. In recent years, however, an increasing number of self-avowed egalitarian philosophers have proposed replacing luck egalitarianism with alternatives that stress the moral relevance of distinct relationships, rather than the moral relevance of good or bad luck. After briefly explaining why I am not attracted to luck egalitarianism, I seek in this chap…Read more
  •  701
    Emergency Contraception and Conscientious Objection
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 27 (3): 290-304. 2010.
    Emergency contraception — also known as the morning after pill — is marketed and sold, under various brand names, in over one hundred countries around the world. In some countries, customers can purchase the drug without a prescription. In others, a prescription must be presented to a licensed pharmacist. In virtually all of these countries, pharmacists are the last link in the chain of delivery. This article examines and ultimately rejects several standard moves in the bioethics literature on t…Read more
  •  604
    Real and Alleged Problems for Daniels's Account of Health Justice
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 38 (4): 388-399. 2013.
    Norman Daniels’s theory of health justice is the most comprehensive and systematic such theory we have. In one of the few articles published so far on Daniels’s new book, Just Health, Benjamin Sachs argues that Daniels’s core “principle of equality of opportunity does not do the work Daniels needs it to do.” Yet Sachs’s objections to Daniels’s framework are deeply flawed. Where these arguments do not rely on significant misreadings of Daniels, they ignore sensible strands in Just Health that con…Read more
  •  588
    Reflections on the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize Awarded to William Nordhaus
    Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 12 (1): 93-107. 2019.
    This paper discusses some ethically relevant aspects of William Nordhaus’s contribution to climate change policy evaluation. Nordhaus's approach can shed light on one—but only one—dimension of the climate change problem. His boldest claims notwithstanding, there is nothing particularly "optimal" about the temperature increases associated with his most famous modeling choices.
  •  558
    Prevention, Rescue and Tiny Risks
    Public Health Ethics 6 (3). 2013.
    Contrary to popular belief, population-wide preventive measures are rarely cost-reducing. Yet they can still be cost-effective, and indeed more cost-effective than treatment. This is often true of preventive measures that work by slightly reducing the already low risks of death faced by many people. This raises a difficult moral question: when we must choose between life-saving treatment, on the one hand, and preventive measures that avert even more deaths, on the other, is the case for preventi…Read more
  •  518
    The Social Cost of Carbon from Theory to Trump
    In Ravi Kanbur & Henry Shue (eds.), Climate Justice: Integrating Economics and Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2018.
    The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a central concept in climate change economics. This chapter explains the SCC and investigates it philosophically. As is widely acknowledged, any SCC calculation requires the analyst to make choices about the infamous topic of discount rates. But to understand the nature and role of discounting, one must understand how that concept—and indeed the SCC concept itself—is yoked to the concept of a value function, whose job is to take ways the world could be across i…Read more
  •  457
    Evaluating Health Inequalities: Residual Worries
    American Journal of Bioethics 15 (3): 50-51. 2015.
  •  376
    Public Health Paternalism and “Expenditure Harm”
    Hastings Center Report 44 (4): 4. 2014.
    A commentary on “Making the Case for Health‐Enhancing Laws after Bloomberg,” in the January‐February 2014issue.
  •  302
    Review of: Prevention vs. Treatment: What’s the Right Balance? (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 201203. 2012.
  •  76
    Energy Policy and the Social Discount Rate
    Ethics, Policy and Environment 15 (1). 2012.
    Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 1, Page 45-50, March 2012