Ethics out of Economics
John Broome
Language: English
Pages: 276
ISBN: 0521644917
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
John Broome's work has always combined sophisticated economic and philosophical expertise, and Ethics Out of Economics brings together some of his most important essays, augmented by a new introduction. This book examines some of the practical issues that lie between economics and ethics, and shows how utility theory can contribute to ethics, as many economic problems are also ethical problems. Professor Broome raises some fundamental questions about economic equality, preserving the environment, and the allocation of medical resources, and powerfully shows how economic methods can contribute to moral philosophy.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Understanding Ethics: An Introduction to Moral Theory (2nd Edition)
The Game of Life (Future History Series, Volume 5)
principle implies 3 C is better than 3 A. This is enough to show the principle is false. How should we respond to the conclusion that the constituency principle 232 The value of life is false?3 One possible response is to give up the constituency principle along with the basic intuition that led to it. This is the response of popula- tion theories that are sometimes called ‘impersonal’.4 Since the basic intui- tion remains attractive, this response pays a penalty in abandoning it, and it
Section 3.7, however, shows it is inconsistent with ordinalism. Section 3.8 argues that this approach is anyway otiose. My aim in this chapter is only to prove that interpersonal comparisons of good are inconsistent with ordinalism. What conclusion should we draw? I draw the conclusion that ordinalism must be incorrect, since inter- personal comparisons of good are clearly possible. But in this chapter I shall not try to prove as much as that. 3.2 Ordinalism I shall take ordinalism to be
values realized by these two careers seem to be so very different that they cannot be weighed against each other in a precise way. In some circum- stances there will be a determinate answer to the question – for instance if you do not believe in God and like guns. But, in more balanced circum- stances, it will not be determinate which is the better option. This phe- nomenon of indeterminacy is often called the ‘incommensurability’ of values. It is often thought to be a central feature of
the twenties do not matter so much. The value you assign to events in her twenties is not independent of what happens at another time, then. You do not believe in strong sepa- rability, and you cannot think that the value of life is additive across time. Is wellbeing at different times strongly separable or not? I am inclined to think not. But there are interesting metaphysical arguments that suggest it is. They have to do with the nature of a person. Some people think a person is nothing
activity. To be fair to Nagel, I must admit that, in effect, this is what he says. But he presents it as a puzzle needing explanation, whereas it is actually trivially true. Once we recognize that goodness is reducible to betterness, it is obvious. The passage I quoted from Epicurus contains two arguments intended to show that death is not an evil. The first is that ‘all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation’. This argument, I have said, is trivially
