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  1. Causing People to Exist and Saving People’s Lives.Jeff McMahan - 2013 - The Journal of Ethics 17 (1):5-35.
    Most people are skeptical of the claim that the expectation that a person would have a life that would be well worth living provides a reason to cause that person to exist. In this essay I argue that to cause such a person to exist would be to confer a benefit of a noncomparative kind and that there is a moral reason to bestow benefits of this kind. But this conclusion raises many problems, among which is that it must be (...)
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  • Reasons and Persons.Joseph Margolis - 1986 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (2):311-327.
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  • (1 other version)John Broome, Weighing Lives. [REVIEW]Jacob Ross - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (4):663-666.
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  • Ethics Out of Economics.John Broome - 1999 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Many economic problems are also ethical problems: should we value economic equality? how much should we care about preserving the environment? how should medical resources be divided between saving life and enhancing life? This book examines some of the practical issues that lie between economics and ethics, and shows how utility theory can contribute to ethics. John Broome's work has, unusually, combined sophisticated economic and philosophical expertise, and Ethics Out of Economics brings together some of his most important essays, augmented (...)
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  • Harm, Benefit, and Non-Identity.Per Algander - 2013 - Dissertation, Uppsala University
    This thesis in an invistigation into the concept of "harm" and its moral relevance. A common view is that an analysis of harm should include a counterfactual condition: an act harms a person iff it makes that person worse off. A common objection to the moral relevance of harm, thus understood, is the non-identity problem. -/- This thesis criticises the counterfactual condition, argues for an alternative analysis and that harm plays two important normative roles. -/- The main ground for rejecting (...)
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  • Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World.John Broome - 2012 - W. W. Norton.
    Esteemed philosopher John Broome avoids the familiar ideological stances on climate change policy and examines the issue through an invigorating new lens. As he considers the moral dimensions of climate change, he reasons clearly through what universal standards of goodness and justice require of us, both as citizens and as governments. His conclusions—some as demanding as they are logical—will challenge and enlighten. Eco-conscious readers may be surprised to hear they have a duty to offset all their carbon emissions, while policy (...)
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  • Persons, Interests, and Justice.Nils Holtug - 2010 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    In our lives, we aim to achieve welfare for ourselves, that is, to live good lives. But we also have another, more impartial perspective, where we aim to balance our concern for our own welfare against a concern for the welfare of others. This is a perspective of justice. Nils Holtug examines these two perspectives and the relations between them.
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  • Moral problems of population.Jan Narveson - 1973 - The Monist 57 (1):62–86.
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  • Can the Person Affecting Restriction solve the problems in population ethics?Gustaf Arrhenius - 2009 - In David Wasserman & Melinda Roberts (eds.), Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem. Springer. pp. 289--314.
    The person-affecting restriction, in its slogan form, states that an outcome can be better than another only if it is better for someone. It has a strong intuitive appeal and several theorists have suggested that it avoids certain counterintuitive implications in population ethics. At the same time, the restriction has highly counterintuitive implications and yields non-transitive orderings in some nonidentity cases. Many theorists have taken this criticism to be decisive. Recently, however, there have been some reformulations of the restriction, suggesting (...)
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  • Weighing lives.John Broome - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    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 (...)
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  • Should We Value Population?John Broome - 2005 - Journal of Political Philosophy 13 (4):399-413.
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  • An impossibility theorem for welfarist axiologies.Gustaf Arrhenius - 2000 - Economics and Philosophy 16 (2):247-266.
    A search is under way for a theory that can accommodate our intuitions in population axiology. The object of this search has proved elusive. This is not surprising since, as we shall see, any welfarist axiology that satisfies three reasonable conditions implies at least one of three counter-intuitive conclusions. I shall start by pointing out the failures in three recent attempts to construct an acceptable population axiology. I shall then present an impossibility theorem and conclude with a short discussion of (...)
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  • Utilitarianism and new generations.Jan Narveson - 1967 - Mind 76 (301):62-72.
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  • Equality, priority or what?Larry S. Temkin - 2003 - Economics and Philosophy 19 (1):61-87.
    This paper aims to illuminate some issues in the equality, priority, or what debate. I characterize egalitarianism and prioritarianism, respond to the view that we should care about sufficiency or compassion rather than equality or priority, discuss the levelling down objection, and illustrate the significance of the distinction between prioritarianism and egalitarianism, establishing that the former is no substitute for the latter. In addition, I respond to Bertil Tungodden's views regarding the Slogan, the levelling down objection, the Pareto Principle, leximin, (...)
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  • Reasons and Persons.Derek Parfit - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interersts, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions (...)
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  • Future people and us.Jan Narveson - 1978 - In Richard I. Sikora & Brian Barry (eds.), Obligations to future generations. Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press. pp. 38--60.
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  • Justice, Desert, and the Repugnant Conclusion.Fred Feldman - 1995 - Utilitas 7 (2):189-206.
    In Chapter 17 of his magnificent Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit asks what he describes as an ‘awesome question’: ‘How many people should there ever be?’ For a utilitarian like me, the answer seems simple: there should be however many people it takes to make the world best. Unfortunately, if I answer Parfit's awesome question in this way, I may sink myself in a quagmire of axiological confusion. In this paper, I first describe certain aspects of the quagmire. Then I (...)
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  • Problems of Population Theory:Obligations to Future Generations. R. I. Sikora, Brian Barry.Jefferson McMahan - 1981 - Ethics 92 (1):96-.
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  • Voices from Another World: Must We Respect the Interests of People Who Do Not, and Will Never, Exist?Caspar Hare - 2007 - Ethics 117 (3):498-523.
    This is about the rights and wrongs of bringing people into existence. In a nutshell: sometimes what matters is not what would have happened to you, but what would have happened to the person who would have been in your position, even if that person never actually exists.
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  • Asymmetries in Benefiting, Harming and Creating.Ben Bradley - 2013 - The Journal of Ethics 17 (1-2):37-49.
    It is often said that while we have a strong reason not to create someone who will be badly off, we have no strong reason for creating someone who will be well off. In this paper I argue that this asymmetry is incompatible with a plausible principle of independence of irrelevant alternatives, and that a more general asymmetry between harming and benefiting is difficult to defend. I then argue that, contrary to what many have claimed, it is possible to harm (...)
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  • Weighing Lives.Daniel M. Hausman - 2005 - Mind 114 (455):718-722.
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  • Asymmetries in the morality of causing people to exist.Jeff McMahan - 2009 - In David Wasserman & Melinda Roberts (eds.), Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem. Springer. pp. 49--68.
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  • The Asymmetry: A Solution.Melinda A. Roberts - 2011 - Theoria 77 (4):333-367.
    The Asymmetry consists of two claims. (A) That a possible person's life would be abjectly miserable –less than worth living – counts against bringing that person into existence. But (B) that a distinct possible person's life would be worth living or even well worth living does not count in favour of bringing that person into existence. In recent years, the view that the two halves of the Asymmetry are jointly untenable has become increasingly entrenched. If we say all persons matter (...)
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  • Review: Problems of Population Theory. [REVIEW]Jefferson McMahan - 1981 - Ethics 92 (1):96 - 127.
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  • Ambiguities in Feldman's Desert-adjusted Values.Ingmar Persson - 1997 - Utilitas 9 (3):319.
    Fred Feldman has argued that consequentialists can answer the well-known by replacing the utilitarian axiology with one that makes the value of receiving pleasures and pains depend on how deserved it is. It is shown that this proposal is open to three interpretations: the Fit-idea, which operates with the degree of fit between what recipients get and what they deserve; the Merit-idea, which operates with the magnitude of the recipients' desert or merit; and the Fit-Merit idea which is a combination (...)
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  • Population Issues in Social Choice Theory, Welfare Economics, and Ethics.Charles Blackorby, Walter Bossert & David J. Donaldson - 2005 - Cambridge University Press.
    This book presents an exploration of the idea of the common or social good, extended so that alternatives with different populations can be ranked. The approach is, in the main, welfarist, basing rankings on the well-being, broadly conceived, of those who are alive. The axiomatic method is employed, and topics investigated include: the measurement of individual well-being, social attitudes toward inequality of well-being, the main classes of population principles, principles that provide incomplete rankings, principles that rank uncertain alternatives, best choices (...)
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