Weighing Lives: The Value of Being Alive - John Broome (2002)

This podcast explores the ethical complexities of weighing lives against other values and the implications for decision-making in various contexts. The speaker argues that the intuition of neutrality, which suggests that adding new people to the world is ethically neutral, is false and has serious consequences for how we evaluate our actions, particularly in the context of global warming.

Value of Life

• 00:00:05 The speaker discusses the importance of developing a theory of the value of human life, acknowledging the challenges in reconciling moral intuitions with a coherent framework. He stresses the need for a theory that is logically consistent and does not conflict with our fundamental moral beliefs.

Weighing Lives

• 00:04:46 The speaker introduces practical problems of weighing lives by presenting examples from healthcare, such as a patient's choice between palliative and aggressive treatment, and resource allocation decisions within healthcare systems. These examples illustrate the tension between quantity and quality of life.

Fairness vs. Goodness

• 00:15:01 The speaker emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between fairness and goodness in ethical decision-making. He argues that maximizing overall goodness may not always be fair, and prioritizing fairness may not lead to the best outcome.

The Neutrality Intuition

• 00:23:01 The speaker introduces the "intuition of neutrality," which suggests that bringing new people into the world is ethically neutral, neither good nor bad. He explores the implications of this intuition for evaluating actions that affect future populations, such as saving young people versus old people, and highlights the potential for conflict with our intuitive understanding of the value of life.

Neutrality Intuition is False

• 00:39:39 The speaker presents a simple argument to demonstrate that the intuition of neutrality is false. By analyzing a hypothetical scenario of a couple having a child, he shows that the intuition leads to logically inconsistent conclusions regarding the value of different lives.

Global Warming and Population

• 00:28:48 The speaker explores the ethical complexities of global warming and its impact on future populations. He argues that the neutrality intuition, if false, requires a fundamental rethinking of our values, as any change in population will have long-lasting consequences. He also highlights the uncertainty surrounding population growth and its influence on global warming.

The Importance of Coherence

• 00:46:47 The speaker reiterates the importance of coherence in moral theory, arguing that our intuitions must fit into a logical framework to be meaningful. He uses the example of transitivity in our judgments of goodness to illustrate the need for consistency in our ethical reasoning.