John Broome (philosopher)

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John Broome (born May 17, 1947 in Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia ) is a British moral philosopher and economist . The focus of his work is practical reason and applied ethics . He has received greater attention since the mid-2000s, particularly through his work on climate ethics.

Life

Broome spent his early childhood in Malaysia and Singapore . From 1965 to 1968 he studied mathematics and economics at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge . This was followed by a four-year PhD in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . In the following two years Broome completed his academic training with a Master of Arts in Philosophy from Bedford College , University of London . From 1972 to 1978 he was a lecturer in economics at Birkbeck College , University of London.

This was followed by 17 years at the University of Bristol , where Broome was appointed Professor of Economics and Philosophy in 1992. From 1995 to 2000 he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews . From 2000 until his retirement in 2014 he taught at Oxford University . Broome was and is also visiting professor at numerous other universities, u. a. in Stanford .

In 2014 he was awarded the University of Bayreuth the Philosopher's Stone ( Philosopher's Stone ) for his work. In the same year he was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

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In the 1970s Broome was mainly concerned with questions of theoretical economics. In the course of the 1980s he increasingly turned to questions at the border between economics and ethics. One focus of his work is to apply economic approaches to individual decisions and benefit optimization to ethical problems. He was particularly concerned with the evaluation of life and examined the bioethical question of the extent to which funds should be used to improve the quality of life or rather for longer life. His work was mainly influenced by Richard Jeffrey , Amartya Sen and Derek Parfit .

Broome has acted as a consultant to several commissions and international organizations. He has written several articles on health and life evaluation for the World Health Organization . His work on climate change earned him more attention .

Broome worked for the Economic and Social Research Council (ERSC) as early as 1992 with the assessment of damage caused by current climate change. In 2006 he worked as a consultant for the Stern Report on the economics of climate change. American economists, above all William D. Nordhaus , criticized the moral assumptions of the report, especially the low discounting in the assessment of future damage - "I find the ethical considerations [...] largely irrelevant," said Nordhaus - and advocated an assessment based on market standards Interest a. Broome was upset and challenged to work out the ethical assumptions on which this market-oriented, seemingly neutral position of American economists was based.

Due to his work on climate change, he became the lead author in Working Group III on the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC for a newly included chapter on climate ethics. Broome was critical of the work done for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the influence of governments on the executive summary that had watered down statements. He described the emission levels for the two-degree target as being out of thin air and advocated viewing climate protection as insurance against a disaster . Broome sees everyone as having a moral duty to reduce emissions as far as possible and offset them through climate compensation and thus avoid harming others.

Fonts

Monographs

  • John Broome: The microeconomics of capitalism . Academic Press, London, New York 1983, ISBN 978-0-12-135780-1 .
  • John Broome and David Ulph: Counting the cost of global warming: a report to the Economic and Social Research Council on research . White Horse, 1992, ISBN 978-1-874267-01-0 ( PDF ).
  • John Broome: Weighing goods: equality, uncertainty, and time . Basil Blackwell, Oxford, England 1995, ISBN 978-0-631-19972-4 .
  • John Broome: Ethics out of economics . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York 1999, ISBN 978-0-521-64491-4 .
  • John Broome: Weighing lives . Clarendon, Oxford 2006, ISBN 978-0-19-929770-2 .
  • John Broome: Climate matters: ethics in a warming world . WW Norton, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-393-06336-3 . , Introduction to climate ethics to a wider public
  • John Broome: Rationality Through Reasoning . Blackwell, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-393-06336-3 .

Technical articles (selection)

Popular science essays

  • John Broome: The ethics of climate change . In: Scientific American . June 2008 ( Online, PDF - introductory text on climate ethics and economics with a special focus on the social discounting of future damage).

Web links

  • John Broome's website with a résumé and a full list of his publications
  • Podcast of a discussion between Broome and Jeff McMahan on Valuing Life and Population Ethics, Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics, 2013
  • Podcast of a public lecture on climate ethics at the London School of Economics, Forum for European Philosophy, 2014

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Press release "Climate change as a challenge for ethics and politics". (PDF) University of Bayreuth, accessed on July 5, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Hicham-Stéphane Afeissa: The problem of moral réchauffement climatique. In: Slate FR . December 16, 2014, accessed July 5, 2015 .
  3. ^ John Broome: Counting the Cost of Global Warming . 1992.
  4. ↑ cf. Nicholas Stern: The Economics of Climate Change . Cambridge 2006, 2 “Economics Ethics and Climate Change” and 2A “Ethical Frameworks and Intertemporal Equity”.
  5. ^ A b Nick Miller: Climate change controversy takes a philosophical turn . In: The Sydney Morning Herald . October 12, 2013 ( HTML ).
  6. ^ Charles Kolstad et al. a .: 3 Social, Economic, and Ethical Concepts and Methods . In: Otmar Edenhofer u. a. (Ed.): Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change . 2015 ( PDF ). PDF ( Memento of the original from May 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ipcc.ch
  7. ^ Broomes report on his experience working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: John Broome: At the IPCC. In: London Review of Books Blog. May 8, 2014, accessed July 5, 2015 .
  8. ^ John Broome: Climate Matters - Ethics in a warming world . 2012, 5: Private Morality.
personal data
SURNAME Broome, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British moral philosopher and economist
DATE OF BIRTH May 17, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia