Suchergebnisse

Abstract
One argument against using cost-benefit analysis to justify policies aimed at promoting human life and health or protecting the environment is that it requires putting a price on priceless goods. This distorts the value of these goods, and it can affect their value by cheapening them. This argument might be rejected by a moral consequentialist who believes that a rational agent should always be able to reflect on his values, even priceless goods, and assess their costs and their importance. This article defends the argument against cost-benefit analysis and suggests that a proper understanding of priceless goods shows that they also raise difficulties for consequentialist moral theories.

Centralized decisions that impose risks demand a justification. The most promising way to justify these decisions is in terms of consent of those people who will be affected by them. Attempts to determine how safe is safe enough in terms of justice, rights, or efficiency are unlikely to get us very far. The problem with consent, however, is that actual consent is impossible to obtain for decisions that affect large numbers of persons. For this reason, we need to explore other kinds of consent and the idea of what a reasonable person would agree to. Three models of consent are described, each one more powerful (but more controversial) in terms of its potential for justifying centralized decisions.

This book offers original and innovative contributions to the debate about equality of opportunity. The author examines standardized tests, affirmative action, workfare, universal health-care, comparable worth, and the economic consequences of divorce

David Boonin has written the most thorough and detailed case for the moral permissibility of abortion yet published. This major book will be especially helpful to those teaching applied ethics and bioethics in philosophy or in law and medicine and to general readers for whom abortion remains a high-profile issue