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 emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Biography

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 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

• Broome, John (1983). The microeconomics of capitalism. London New York: Academic Press. ISBN 9780121357801.
• Broome, John (1992). Counting the cost of global warming : a report to the Economic and Social Research Council on research by John Broome and David Ulph. Cambridge: White Horse. ISBN 9781874267010.
• Broome, John (1995). Weighing goods: equality, uncertainty, and time. Oxford England: Basil Blackwell. ISBN 9780631199724.
• Broome, John (1999). Ethics out of economics. Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521644914.
• Broome, John (2006). Weighing lives. Oxford: Clarendon. ISBN 9780199297702.
• Broome, John (2012). Climate matters: ethics in a warming world. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 9780393063363.
• Broome, John (2013). Rationality Through Reasoning. New York: Blackwell. ISBN 9780393063363.

Chapters in books

• Broome, John (2009), "Why economics needs ethical theory", in Kanbur, Ravi; Basu, Kaushik (eds.), Arguments for a better world: essays in honor of Amartya Sen | Volume I: Ethics, welfare, and measurement, Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 7–14, ISBN 9780199239115