Professor John Broome

John 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. In 2007 Broome was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His pioneering book Weighing Goods (1991) explores the way in which goods "located" in each of the three "dimensions" -- time, people, states of nature—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.