Copyright © John Broome 1991, 1995
First published 1991
First published in paperback 1995
Transferred to Digital print 2003
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Broome, John.
Weighing goods/John Broome.
p. cm.—(Economics and philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–631–17199–1 (Hbk) — ISBN 0–631–19972–1 (Pbk)
1. Economics—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. II. Series:
Economics and philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.)
HB72.B76 1991
330′.01—dc20 90—26662 CIP
This is a book about ethics, which uses some of the methods of economics. I think it is already widely recognized that formal methods derived from economics can contribute to ethics. This book is concerned with some features of the structure of good, and in that area I believe these methods are especially fruitful.
Not only do many of my methods come from economics, but many of my conclusions have economic applications, too. I shall, for instance, be investigating the value of equality. I hope, therefore, that this book may attract readers from both economics and philosophy. Inevitably, each group will encounter some difficulties. For philosophers, many of the techniques may be unfamiliar, and perhaps in places daunting. I ask them to be patient with the symbols. Nowhere in the entire book is there any mathematics beyond elementary algebra, and I have done my best to explain the algebraic arguments carefully. (I have twice mentioned logarithms, but only in examples that may be skipped.) The Appendix to Chapter 4 and Section 10.1 may also be skipped. They contain informal proofs, where some readers may find the elementary algebra clusters too densely on the page.
Economists, on the other hand, will find much of the algebra tediously slow. I ask them to be patient too. What, I think, they may find difficult to understand is my focus on good rather than preferences. My techniques come from utility theory, which was developed for preferences, but I have redirected them towards the structure of good. Even to separate a person’s good from her preferences will make many economists uneasy; it will suggest to them a worrying paternalism. Chapter 7, particularly Section 7.3, is addressed to this concern. It explains why my argument cannot be built around preferences. I hope these economists will be willing to recognize that there is such a thing as a person’s good, which may or may not be determined by her preferences. In working with good rather than preferences I am being more general. I am allowing for cases where good is determined by preferences, and also for cases, which do exist, where it is not. It is not paternalistic simply to speak of a person’s good.
This book began life as a long paper I wrote while I was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in 1982–83. I thank the college for its kind hospitality, and also the Social Science Research Council, which supported me for that year. I developed various parts of the argument in articles during the succeeding years. They began to come together as a book during a course of seminars I gave at Princeton University in 1988. I am grateful to Princeton for this opportunity. Finally, the Economics Department at Bristol University, where I work, allowed me a term of study leave in 1989 to complete the writing. I am very grateful to the members of the department.
Over the years, I have been very fortunate in the many valuable comments I have received on parts of the book, and on earlier versions of the arguments. I am sure I have forgotten some of the people who have helped me, and to them I offer both apologies and thanks. Those I particularly remember include Jonathan Dancy, Nicholas Denyer, Peter Hammond, Sally Haslanger, Susan Hurley, Daniel Hausman, Donald Hubin, Richard Jeffrey, Douglas MacLean, Amartya Sen, John Skorupski, and Brian Skyrms. My thanks to all of them. I want to express my especial gratitude to John Harsanyi, Shelly Kagan, James Mirrlees, Adam Morton, Derek Parfit and Larry Temkin for the exceptionally helpful and detailed comments I received from them on sections of the book. Besides all these, Duncan Foley, Alan Hamlin, Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit and Paul Seabright were all generous enough to read drafts of the entire book. I am sure the finished product has benefited greatly from their excellent advice. I am very grateful to them.
Parts of Chapter 1 also appear in my contribution to Foundations of Decision Theory: Issues and Advances, edited by Michael Bacharach and Susan Hurley and published by Blackwell in 1991. Parts of Chapter 11 also appear in my contribution to Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-Being, edited by Jon Elster and John Roemer and published by Cambridge University Press in 1991.
I should also like to acknowledge the help of WordPerfect UK.