Normative Ethics: Weighing Goods and Weighing Lives

This seminar serves as an introduction to various issues in formal ethics. Our guide is John Broome's books Weighing Goods and Weighing Lives, which together advance a theory of welfare aggregation across people, under uncertainty, and over time. Topics include the following: distributive equality, the value of additional lives, ex ante vs. ex post approaches to social risk, separability and Pareto principles, the structure of betterness relations, and axiomatic foundations of utilitarianism.