Review of Ethics out of Economics by John Broome

The work of John Broome hardly needs an introduction to the readership of Social Choice and Welfare. It is a rare example of an intellectual e¤ort of a high quality which has managed to remain in the di¢ cult boundary zone between economics and philosophy. Ethics out of Economics is a collection of papers which, with one exception,1 have all been published by the author in the last ten years. The papers are consistently presented and organized in such a way as to complete the book “Weighing Goods”([3]) written by John Broome some ten years ago. In this latter book, Broome develops a wide encompassing theory of ethics that is based on the notion of “goodness”. Roughly putted, Broome’s theory says that alternative social states should be ethically compared only on the basis of the “goodness”of the consequences that they entail for the individuals. Comparing alternative social states requires therefore an assessment (weighing) of the di¤erent consequences that these social states may have on the “good”of the di¤erent individuals involved and to aggregate these di¤erent consequences into a ranking of the social states. To that extent, and at least when examined from the view point of an economist, Broome’s ethical theory is welfarist in the sense given to that word by Amartya Sen. It stands on the premise that the only information that is relevant to compare alternative states of a¤airs is the well-being (the “good”) achieved by individuals in those states. It is obviously outside the scope of this review to discuss the merits and limitations of this view. Broome’s himself has remained remarkably unresponsive to the various challenges which have been launched against welfarist principles of ethics from various spheres (notably Rawls [15], Sen ([17],[18],[19], [20]), Dworkin [5] and Roemer [16]). Taken these principles for granted, Broome tries instead to apply them to speci…c and delicate issues involving uncertainty, time and variable populations. One should not be misled by the meaning of the word “apply” in the last sentence. For Broome’s work could certainly not be considered as “applied”in any ordinary account of the word. Quite to the contrary his work is abstract and philosophical in nature, based on discussions and argumentations rather than the building of speci…c models. This feature of Broome’s work, which is more apparent in Ethics out of Economics than it was in Weighing goods,