•  1075
    What Should We Agree on about the Repugnant Conclusion?
    with Stephane Zuber, Nikhil Venkatesh, Torbjörn Tännsjö, Christian Tarsney, H. Orri Stefánsson, Katie Steele, Dean Spears, Jeff Sebo, Marcus Pivato, Toby Ord, Yew-Kwang Ng, Michal Masny, William MacAskill, Nicholas Lawson, Kevin Kuruc, Michelle Hutchinson, Johan E. Gustafsson, Hilary Greaves, Lisa Forsberg, Marc Fleurbaey, Diane Coffey, Susumu Cato, Clinton Castro, Tim Campbell, John Broome, Alexander Berger, Nick Beckstead, and Geir B. Asheim
    Utilitas 33 (4): 379-383. 2021.
    The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.
  •  425
    Collective action problems lie behind many core issues in ethics and social philosophy—for example, whether an individual is required to vote, whether it is wrong to consume products that are produced in morally objectionable ways, and many others. In these cases, it matters greatly what we together do, but yet a single individual’s ‘non-cooperative’ choice seems to make no difference to the outcome and also seems to involve no violation of anyone’s rights. Here it is argued that—contrary to inf…Read more
  •  354
    Many philosophers endorse utilitarian arguments against eating meat along the lines of Peter Singer’s, while others endorse deontological arguments along the lines of Tom Regan’s. This chapter suggests that both types of arguments are too quick. Empirical reasons are outlined for thinking that when one eats meat, that doesn’t make a difference to animals in the way that it would have to for either type of argument to be sound—and this chapter argues that this is true notwithstanding recent “expe…Read more
  •  193
    Non-cognitivism and rational inference
    Philosophical Studies 153 (2). 2011.
    Non-cognitivism might seem to offer a plausible account of evaluative judgments, at least on the assumption that there is a satisfactory solution to the Frege-Geach problem. However, Cian Dorr has argued that non-cognitivism remains implausible even assuming that the Frege-Geach problem can be solved, on the grounds that non-cognitivism still has to classify some paradigmatically rational inferences as irrational. Dorr's argument is ingenious and at first glance seems decisive. However, in this …Read more
  •  156
    The Social Cost of Carbon: Valuing Inequality, Risk, and Population for Climate Policy
    with Marc Fleurbaey, Maddalena Ferranna, Francis Dennig, Kian Mintz-Woo, Robert Socolow, Dean Spears, and Stéphane Zuber
    The Monist 102 (1): 84-109. 2019.
    We analyze the role of ethical values in the determination of the social cost of carbon, arguing that the familiar debate about discounting is too narrow. Other ethical issues are equally important to computing the social cost of carbon, and we highlight inequality, risk, and population ethics. Although the usual approach, in the economics of cost-benefit analysis for climate policy, is confined to a utilitarian axiology, the methodology of the social cost of carbon is rather flexible and can be…Read more
  •  115
    The spectre of the repugnant conclusion and the search for a population axiology that avoids it has endured as a focus of population ethics. This is in part because the repugnant conclusion is often interpreted as a defining problem for totalism, while the implications of averagism and related views are taken to illustrate the theoretical cost of avoiding the repugnant conclusion. However, we show that this interpretation cannot be sustained unless one focuses only on a special case of the repug…Read more
  •  101
    Food, Ethics, and Society: An Introductory Text with Readings (edited book)
    Oxford University Press USA. 2016.
    Like the subtitle says, this is an intro to food ethics that also collects writings on food ethics by others. Topics include: animals, consumption, farming, identity, justice, paternalism, religion, and workers.
  •  94
    The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2017.
    The handbook is a partial survey of multiple areas of food ethics: conventional agriculture and alternatives to it; animals; consumption ethics; food justice; food workers; food politics and policy; gender, body image, and healthy eating; and, food, culture and identity. Food ethics, as an academic pursuit, is vast, incorporating work from philosophy as well as anthropology, economics, environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, law, and sociology. This Handbook provides a samp…Read more
  •  84
    Self-Defense, Harm to Others, and Reasons for Action in Collective Action Problems
    Ethics, Policy and Environment 17 (1): 31-34. 2014.
    Baatz’s excellent discussion moves the debate forward in two ways that I will focus on here: first, by articulating an attractive view based on the notion of what can reasonably be demanded of individuals, and second, by providing a helpful overview of much of the existing literature. In what follows I suggest three ways Baatz and others might further clarify and build on these contributions in future research.
  •  75
    In this chapter, Mark Budolfson and Dean Spears analyse the marginal effect of philanthropic donations. The core of their analysis is the observation that marginal good done per dollar donated is a product (in the mathematical sense) of several factors: change in good done per change in activity level of the charity in question, change in activity per change in the charity’s budget size, and change in budget size per change in the individual’s donation to the charity in question. They then discu…Read more
  •  71
    The standard interpretation of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic is that correct land management is whatever tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community, of which we humans are merely a small part. From this interpretation, it is a short step to interpreting Leopold as a sort of deep ecologist or radical environmentalist. However, this interpretation is based on a small number of quotations from Leopold taken out of context. Once these quota­tions are put into context,…Read more
  •  66
    Consumer ethics, food ethics, and beyond
    In College Ethics: A Reader on Moral Issues that Affect You, 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press. pp. 582-596. 2020.
    When is it wrong to buy something? Is it wrong whenever the product was produced unethically? What if your purchase doesn’t make adifference to whether the unethical practice continues? What about purchasing and eating animal products specifically? And however answer all those questions, how should we engage with people who act wrongly as consumers? In this essay, Mark Budolfson provides some tools for thinking more clearly about these questions, arguing that we need to be careful to separate our …Read more
  •  63
    Does the Repugnant Conclusion have important implications for axiology or for public policy?
    with Dean Spears
    In Gustaf Arrhenius (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics, . 2022.
    Formal arguments have proven that avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion is impossible without rejecting one or more highly plausible population principles. To many, such proofs establish not only a deep challenge for axiology, but also pose an important practical problem of how policymaking can confidently proceed without resolving any of the central questions of population ethics. Here we offer deflationary responses: first to the practical challenge, and then to the more fundamental challenge for …Read more
  •  59
    If non-human animals experience wellbeing and suffering, such welfare consequences arguably should be included in a social welfare evaluation. Yet economic evaluations almost universally ignore non-human animals, in part because axiomatic social choice theory has failed to propose and characterize multi-species social welfare functions. Here we propose axioms and functional forms to fill this gap. We provide a range of alternative representations, characterizing a broad range of possibilities fo…Read more
  •  53
    Optimal Climate Policy and the Future of World Economic Development
    with Francis Dennig, Marc Fleurbaey, Noah Scovronick, Asher Siebert, Dean Spears, and Fabian Wagner
    The World Bank Economic Review 33. 2019.
    How much should the present generations sacrifice to reduce emissions today, in order to reduce the future harms of climate change? Within climate economics, debate on this question has been focused on so-called “ethical parameters” of social time preference and inequality aversion. We show that optimal climate policy similarly importantly depends on the future of the developing world. In particular, although global poverty is falling and the economic lives of the poor are improving worldwide, l…Read more
  •  50
    Public Policy, Consequentialism, the Environment, and Non-Human Animals
    with Dean Spears
    In Douglas W. Portmore (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism, Oxford University Press. pp. 592-615. 2020.
    The focus of this chapter is public policy and consequentialism, especially issues that arise in connection with the environment – i.e. the natural world, including non-human animals. We integrate some of the existing literature on environmental economics, welfare economics, and policy with the literature on environmental values and philosophy. The emphasis on environmental policy is motivated by the fact that it is arguably the most philosophically interesting and challenging application of con…Read more
  •  49
    Philosophy and Climate Change (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2021.
    This volume is guided by two thoughts. First, philosophers have much to contribute to the discussion of climate change. Second, reflection on climate change can contribute to our thinking about a range of general topics that are of independent interest to philosophers. This volume will be of interest both to philosophers working on climate change as well as those working in a range of other fields, ranging from public policy to economics to law to empirical disciplines including psychology, the …Read more
  •  45
    Food, the Environment, and Global Justice
    In Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson & Tyler Doggett (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 67-94. 2017.
    This chapter identifies and critically examines a standard form of argument for organic and vegan alternatives to industrial agriculture. This argument faces important objections to its empirical premises, to its presumption that there is a single food system that minimizes harm and is best for the environment, and to the presumption that the ethically best food system for us to promote is the one that would be best in ideal theory or the one that would be best from the perspective of our own so…Read more
  •  45
    Discourse on food ethics often advocates the anti-capitalist idea that we need less capitalism, less growth, and less globalization if we want to make the world a better and more equitable place. This idea is also familiar from much discourse in global ethics, environment, and political theory, more generally. However, many experts argue that this anti-capitalist idea is not supported by reason and argument, and is actually wrong. As part of the roundtable, “Ethics and the Future of the Global F…Read more
  •  43
    Consumer Ethics, Harm Footprints, and the Empirical Dimensions of Food Choices
    In Andrew Chignell, Terence Cuneo & Matthew Halteman (eds.), Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments on the Ethics of Eating, Routledge. pp. 163-181. 2015.
  •  30
    The social cost of carbon, humility, and overlapping consensus on climate policy
    In Jonathan H. Adler (ed.), Climate Liberalism: Perspectives on Liberty, Property, and Pollution, Palgrave, . forthcoming.
    At first glance, it may seem that climate policy based on estimates of the social cost of carbon (SCC) presupposes a set of controversial assumptions, especially about what detailed knowledge regulators have about the impacts of climate change, and what the proper role of government and policy is in responding to those impacts. However, I explain why the SCC-based approach need not actually have these problematic presuppositions as well as why SCC estimates may provide the best guide to climate …Read more
  •  28
    The impact of human health co-benefits on evaluations of global climate policy
    with Noah Scovronick, Francis Dennig, Frank Errickson, Marc Fleurbaey, Wei Peng, Robert H. Socolow, Dean Spears, and Fabian Wagner
    Nature Communications 2095 (19). 2019.
    The health co-benefits of CO2 mitigation can provide a strong incentive for climate policy through reductions in air pollutant emissions that occur when targeting shared sources. However, reducing air pollutant emissions may also have an important co-harm, as the aerosols they form produce net cooling overall. Nevertheless, aerosol impacts have not been fully incorporated into cost-benefit modeling that estimates how much the world should optimally mitigate. Here we find that when both co-b…Read more
  •  25
    Inequality, climate impacts on the future poor, and carbon prices
    with Francis Dennig, Marc Fleurbaey, Asher Siebert, and Robert H. Socolow
    Pnas 112 (52). 2015.
    Integrated assessment models of climate and the economy provide estimates of the social cost of carbon and inform climate policy. We create a variant of the Regional Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (RICE)—a regionally disaggregated version of the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (DICE)—in which we introduce a more fine-grained representation of economic inequalities within the model’s regions. This allows us to model the common observation that climate change impac…Read more
  •  24
    Repugnant Conclusions
    Social Choice and Welfare 57. 2021.
    The population ethics literature has long focused on attempts to avoid the repugnant conclusion. We show that a large set of social orderings that are conventionally understood to escape the repugnant conclusion do not in fact avoid it in all instances. As we demonstrate, prior results depend on formal definitions of the repugnant conclusion that exclude some repugnant cases, for reasons inessential to any "repugnance" (or other meaningful normative properties) of the repugnant conclusion. In pa…Read more
  •  23
    Population Ethics and the Prospects for Fertility Policy as Climate Mitigation Policy
    Journal of Development Studies 57 (9): 1499-1510. 2021.
    What are the prospects for using population policy as tool to reduce carbon emissions? In this paper, we review evidence from population science, in order to inform debates in population ethics that, so far, have largely taken place within the academic philosophy literature. In particular, we ask whether fertility policy is likely to have a large effect on carbon emissions, and therefore on temperature change. Our answer is no. Prospects for a policy of fertility-reduction-as-climate-mitigation …Read more
  •  22
    Population Issues in Welfare Economics, Ethics, and Policy Evaluation
    The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance. 2022.
    Nearly all large policy decisions influence not only the quality of life for existing individuals but also the number-and even identities-of yet-to-exist individuals. Accounting for these effects in a policy evaluation framework requires taking difficult stances on concepts such as the value of existence. These issues are at the heart of a literature that sits between welfare economics and philosophical population ethics. Despite the inherent challenges of these questions, this literature has pr…Read more
  •  21
    Optimal Global Climate Policy and Regional Carbon Prices
    with Francis Dennig
    In Handbook on the Economics of Climate Change, Edward Elgar Publishing. pp. 224-238. 2020.
    It is often stated that optimal global climate policy requires global harmonization of marginal abatement costs – i.e., a single carbon price throughout the world. Chichilnisky and Heal (1994) have shown quite generally that this is only the case if distributional issues are ignored, or if lump-sum transfers are made between countries. Else, a policy in which different regions face different carbon prices may be superior to one with a single global carbon price from a welfare point of view. Stil…Read more
  •  21
    Tools are needed to benchmark carbon emissions and pledges against criteria of equity and fairness. However, standard economic approaches, which use a transparent optimization framework, ignore equity. Models that do include equity benchmarks exist, but often use opaque methodologies. Here we propose a utilitarian benchmark computed in a transparent optimization framework, which could usefully inform the equity benchmark debate. Implementing the utilitarian benchmark, which we see as ethically m…Read more
  •  17
    Human Health and the Social Cost of Carbon: a primer and a call to action
    with Noah Scovronick, Valeri N. Vasquez, Frank Errickson, Francis Dennig, Antonio Gasparrini, Shakoor Hajat, and Dean Spears
    Epidemiology 30 (5). 2019.
    Over the past few decades, we have improved our understanding of the health impacts of climate change.1 Although many public health researchers have contributed to this knowledge, relatively few are aware of how their work may relate to the social cost of carbon. The social cost of carbon is a core economic concept in climate policy and one that can—and should—benefit directly from research produced by the public health community. The concept’s importance was recently highlighted by this past ye…Read more