How should we weigh lives? This book develops a theoretical basis for answering this practical question. It examines many of the issues of contemporary moral theory: the nature of consequentialism and teleology; the transitivity, continuity, and vagueness of betterness; the quantitative conception of wellbeing; and others.

It carefully examines the common intuition that adding people to the population is ethically neutral - neither a good nor a bad thing - but eventually concludes this intuition cannot be fitted into a coherent theory of value. In the course of its argument, Weighing Lives examines many of the issues of contemporary moral theory: the nature of consequentialism and teleology; the transitivity, continuity, and vagueness of betterness; the quantitative conception of wellbeing; the notion of a life worth living; the badness of death; and others. This is a work of philosophy, but one of its distinctive features is that it adopts some of the precise methods of economic theory (without introducing complex mathematics). Not only philosophers, but also economists and political theorists concerned with the practical question of valuing life, should find the book's conclusions highly significant to their work.

1. Weighing lives
2. Some technical matters
3. Right and good
4. Features of Goodness
5. Quantities of lifetime wellbeing
6. Quantities of temporal wellbeing
7. Separability of times
8. Separability of lives
9. Same-number aggregation
10. The neutral level for existence
11. Nonstandard betterness
12. Indeterminate betterness
13. Separability of people
14. The standardized total principle
15. Same-lifetime aggregation
16. A life worth living
17. The value of a life
18. The theory of weighing lives
Bibliography
Index