IMPARTIALITY IN WEIGHING LIVES

Abstract

Weighing Lives examines the problems of choice that we face when the options available to us not only have consequences for different people at different times but also for what people there are at each point in time, for who is alive and when. The principal conclusion of the book is that the goodness of a distribution of wellbeing across a population over some period of time is measured by the sum of the standardized wellbeings of the individuals belonging to it (over that time period), where the standardized wellbeing of an individual is the difference between their wellbeing and a constant that measures the ‘critical level’ of wellbeing above which someone’s existence is a good thing. Broome is not the first to make this claim it is, for instance, the heart of what Blackorby, Bossert and Donaldson ([1],[2]) call Critical-level Utilitarianism but his book surely provides the most careful and systematic examination of both its foundations and its consequences. The idea of a critical or neutral level of wellbeing, of a level at which it is better that someone exists than that they do not, is in apparent contradiction with intuitions that many people have about what they or policy makers should do when considering options that affect the number of living people. Consider the following two examples: