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. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/philosophy/019924376X/toc.html
Against Denialism Broome, John
The Monist,
01/2019, Letnik:
102, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Several philosophers deny that an individual person’s emissions of greenhouse gas do any harm; I call these “individual denialists.” I argue that each individual’s emissions may do harm, and that ...they certainly do expected harm. I respond to the denialists’ arguments.
Science today is rapidly becoming both multi-disciplinary and data-driven. These two trends pose new challenges to the capture, management, sharing, and dissemination of research data. ...Multi-disciplinary science means diverse data generation communities and equally diverse user groups. Data-driven means that sharing data among different communities is more important than ever because of the growth of modeling and knowledge discovery. Nanotechnology is a prime example, involving chemistry, physics, materials science, toxicology, environmental science, and many other disciplines. During the past few years, CODATA has created an international, multi-disciplinary Working Group that has developed a number of critically important metadata standards to facilitate sharing nanomaterials data. In this paper, we discuss the challenges faced in starting and executing this work, as well as the approaches taken to make progress on producing internationally accepted metadata standards. Many of these approaches are directly applicable to other multi-disciplinary subjects.
Comments on Boghossian Broome, John
Philosophical studies,
05/2014, Letnik:
169, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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Broome thinks Paul Boghossian's expression taking something to be a reason takes Boghossian further than he would want to go. It implies that normative thoughts are necessary for reasoning. It is ...also further than he should go. You cannot take something to be a reason unless you know what it is for something to be a reason. Yet that piece of normative knowledge is not required simply for you to be able to follow a rule. In particular, it is not required if you are to be able to do reasoning.
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 with an updated introduction. The first group of essays deals with the relation between preference and value, the second with various questions about the formal structure of good, and the concluding section with the value of life. This work is of interest and importance for both economists and philosophers, and shows powerfully how economic methods can contribute to moral philosophy.
Arsenic exhibits a differential toxicity to cancer cells. At a high concentration (>5 microM), As2O3 causes acute necrosis in various cell lines. At a lower concentration (0.5-5 microm), it induces ...myeloid cell maturation and an arrest in metaphase, leading to apoptosis. As2O3-treated cells have features found with both tubulin-assembling enhancers (Taxol) and inhibitors (colchicine). Prior treatment of monomeric tubulin with As2O3 markedly inhibits GTP-induced polymerization and microtubule formation in vitro but does not destabilize GTP-induced tubulin polymers. Cross-inhibition experiments indicate that As2O3 is a noncompetitive inhibitor of GTP binding to tubulin. These observations correlate with the three-dimensional structure of beta-tubulin and suggest that the cross-linking of two vicinal cysteine residues (Cys-12 and Cys-213) by trivalent arsenic inactivates the GTP binding site. Furthermore, exogenous GTP can prevent As2O3-induced mitotic arrest.
Wide or Narrow Scope? Broome, John
Mind,
04/2007, Letnik:
116, Številka:
462
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper is a response to ‘Why Be Rational?’ by Niko Kolodny. Kolodny argues that we have no reason to satisfy the requirements of rationality. His argument assumes that these requirements have a ...logically narrow scope. To see what the question of scope turns on, this comment provides a semantics for ‘requirement’. It shows that requirements of rationality have a wide scope, at least under one sense of ‘requirement’. Consequently Kolodny's conclusion cannot be derived.
Rationality versus Normativity Broome, John
Australasian philosophical review,
10/01/2020, 2020-10-01, Letnik:
4, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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Philosophers often do not make as sharp a distinction as they should between rationality and normativity. Partly this is because the word 'reason' can be used to refer to either, and this leads to a ...confusion over meanings. This paper starts by clarifying the meanings of 'normativity' and 'rationality'. It argues that it is a conceptual truth that rationality supervenes on the mind. Then it considers substantive arguments that purport to show there is no real distinction between rationality and normativity. Many philosophers give a reductive account of rationality in terms of reasons. In particular, many claim that rationality consists in responding correctly to reasons. Since responding correctly to reasons is the concern of normativity, this in effect identifies rationality with normativity. This paper denies that rationality is identical to normativity, by means of what I call a 'quick objection'. The quick objection is that rationality supervenes on the mind whereas complying with normativity does not. I consider and reject some ways of responding to the quick objection, including an argument by Kiesewetter to the effect that normativity supervenes on the mind and one by Lord to the effect that rationality does not. I also consider a different, Kantian argument to the effect that rationality does not supervene on the mind.
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