"Population, separability, and discounting" (Global Priorities Institute Seminar)
When economists aggregate people’s wellbeing to make judgement about the overall good of a society, they sometimes discount later wellbeing compared with earlier wellbeing. This makes good sense only if all wellbeing is dated, which implies that wellbeing is separable across times. But this sort of separability makes it hard to take proper account of the value of extending people’s lives. Any solution to this problem will depend on a theory about the value of population. The upshot is that any theory of discounting is committed to a particular ethics of population.
Date: 5 June 2020, 15:00
Venue: Venue to be announced
Speaker: Prof John Broome (University of Oxford)
Organisers: Dr Andreas Mogensen (GPI, University of Oxford), Dr Christian Tarsney (GPI, University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: gpi-office@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Global Priorities Institute Seminars - Trinity Term 2020
Topics:
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/global-priorities-seminar-john-broome-tickets-105930290350
Cost: Free
Audience: Public
Editor: William Jefferson