John Broome

John Broome (born 1947) is a British philosopher and economist. He is emeritus White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford and an emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Biography Broome was educated at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 1968 in Mathematics and Economics from Cambridge's Trinity Hall. He also studied at the University of London and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a PhD in economics. After being invited to study there by David Wiggins and receiving an MA in Philosophy at Bedford College, London Broome became an economics professor and taught at Birbeck College in London and later Bristol. After leaving Oxford in 2014, he took a visiting professor position at Stanford University. , and the University of Canterbury. In 2007, Broome was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2013, Broome received an honorary doctoral degree from the Faculty of Humanities for Lund University. In 2014, Broome was elected an International Honorary Member of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his contributions to the fields of philosophy and economics. Broome is also listed as an honorary fellow in addition to his alumnus status from Trinity Hall at Cambridge, though the exact date it was awarded is not listed.

His 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. In his book Weighing Lives (2004), Broome rejects the presumed intuition that adding people to the population is ethically neutral. In his collection of papers, titled Ethics out of Economics (1999), he discusses topics such as value, equality, fairness, and utility.

Selected bibliography

Books

Chapters in books