John Broome (philosopher)
John Broome is a
British philosopher and
economist. He is currently the
White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the
University of Oxford and a
Fellow of
Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Broome was educated at the
University of Cambridge, at the
University of London and at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a PhD in
economics. Before arriving at Oxford he was Professor of Philosophy at the
University of St. Andrews and, prior to that, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at the
University of Bristol. He has held visiting posts at the
University of Virginia, the
Australian National University,
Princeton University, the
University of Washington, the
University of British Columbia, the
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, and the
University of Canterbury.
His pioneering book
Weighing Goods (1991) explores the way in which goods "located" in each of the three "dimensions" make up overall goodness. Broome argues that these dimensions are linked by what he calls the
interpersonal addition theorem, which supports the
utilitarian principle of distribution. This investigation is carried further in his book
Weighing Lives (2004), where the intuition that adding people to the population is ethically neutral is subjected to close examination, and eventually rejected. These systematic works are complemented by his
Ethics out of Economics (1999), a collection of papers on topics at the intersection between
moral philosophy and
economic theory, such as
value,
equality,
fairness, and
utility. Broome's writings in all these three works are marked by rigorous formal presentation, careful argumentation and extraordinary lucidity.
*
Derek Parfit*
John Broome's home page at the University of Oxford. Includes a full list of publications and links to online papers.
