Weighing Lives by John Broome

Weighing Lives by John Broome

We are often faced with choices that involve the weighing of people's lives against each other, or the weighing of lives against other good things. These are choices both for individuals and for societies. A person who is terminally ill may have to choose between palliative care and more aggressive treatment, which will give her a longer life but at some cost in suffering. We have to choose between the convenience to ourselves of road and air travel, and the lives of the future people who will be killed by the global warming we cause, through violent weather, tropical disease, and heat waves. We also make choices that affect how many lives there will be in the future: as individuals we choose how many children to have, and societies choose tax policies that influence people's choices about having children. These are all problems of weighing lives.How should we weigh lives? Weighing Lives develops a theoretical basis for answering this practical question. It extends the work and methods of Broome's earlier book Weighing Goods to cover the questions of life and death.Difficult problems come up in the process. In particular, Weighing Lives tackles the well-recognized, awkward problems of the ethics of population. It carefully examines the common intuition that adding people to the population is ethically neutral - neither a good nor a bad thing - but eventually concludes this intuition cannot be fitted into a coherent theory of value. In the course of its argument, Weighing Lives examines many of the issues of contemporary moral theory: the nature of consequentialism and teleology; the transitivity, continuity, and vagueness of betterness; the quantitative conception of wellbeing; the notion of a life worth living; the badness of death; and others.This is a work of philosophy, but one of its distinctive features is that it adopts some of the precise methods of economic theory (without introducing complex mathematics). Not only philosophers, but also economists and political theorists concerned with the practical question of valuing life, should find the book's conclusions highly significant to their work.

Numerous publications grapple with the value of life, but Weighing Lives is more important and more substantial than mostIn an area in which many authors content themselves with a gallimaufry of peculiar moral intuitions, Broome digs deep and argues with rigour. * TLS *
An engrossing book which is a model of clarity, elegance, and rigour. Written, as good philosophy should be, as a contribution to a joint enterprise, it sets out a bold position in a way that invites further discussion and provides a platform for the development of diverging views. It should serve as the reference-point for future theorizing about population ethics in particular, and the aggregation of well-being more generally. * Garrett Cullity, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *

Beginning with the second story in SHOWCASE #4 (the issue that inaugurated the character's new incarnation) and continuing on THE FLASH until 1970, John Broome authored the majority of the Silver Age Flash stories. Broome's resume included Captain Marvel and the rest of the Marvel Family, the Golden Age Green Lantern, the Justice Society of America, Captain Comet, the Silver Age revival of Green Lantern, the Atomic Knights, Batman, Star Hawkins, Rex the Wonder Dog, Detective Chimp, and a variety of science fiction adventures before joining the Flash. Broome left the comic book industry in the 1970s and died in 1999.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780199243761
ISBN 10	019924376X
Title	Weighing Lives
Author	John Broome
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	2004-08-05
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.