Title: Weighing lives /
Authors: Broome, John.
Publisher: Oxford University Press,
Year: 2004
Subjects: Ethics.; Values.; Waarden.; Bevolking.
Abstract: "We are often faced with choices that involve the weighing 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 heartwaves. 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.^
Contents: Weighing lives -- Some technical matters -- Right and good -- Features of goodness -- Quantities of lifetime wellbeing -- Quantities of temporal wellbeing -- Separability of times -- Separability of lives -- Same-number aggregation -- The neutral level for existence -- Nonstandard betterness -- Indeterminate betterness -- Separability of people -- The standardized total principle -- Same-lifetime aggregation -- A life worth living -- The value of a life -- The theory of weighing lives.