Description
Book SynopsisWe 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 metho
Trade ReviewNumerous publications grapple with the value of life, but Weighing Lives is more important and more substantial than most. In 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 *
Table of Contents1. Weighing lives ; 2. Some technical matters ; 3. Right and good ; 4. Features of Goodness ; 5. Quantities of lifetime wellbeing ; 6. Quantities of temporal wellbeing ; 7. Separability of times ; 8. Separability of lives ; 9. Same-number aggregation ; 10. The neutral level for existence ; 11. Nonstandard betterness ; 12. Indeterminate betterness ; 13. Separability of people ; 14. The standardized total principle ; 15. Same-lifetime aggregation ; 16. A life worth living ; 17. The value of a life ; 18. The theory of weighing lives ; Bibliography ; Index
