March 2013 Andrew Reisner John Broome John Broome, b. 1947, British philosopher and economist and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford, who is best known for his work on consequentialist ethics and applications thereof to population bioethics and global warming, and also for his work on rationality, normativity, and reasoning. Broome received a doctorate in economics from M.I.T. (1972). His earlier philosophical papers explored the connection between economic theory and ethical theory, many of which later appeared in Ethics out of Economics (1999). He is one of an important group of British philosophers who in the late 1980s and early 1990s spurred a revival of interest in sophisticated consequentialist ethical theories. Broome's Weighing Goods: Equality, Uncertainty, and Time (1991) has become a modern classic of utilitarianism. Broome took up the topic of distributive ethics again in Weighing Lives (2004). It extends his earlier work to include comparisons of the value of distributions across populations of varying size and membership. Aer publishing an early book on the ethics of climate change, Counting the Cost of Global Warming, he later became a lead author on Working Group III of the United Nation's International Panel on Climate Change. In Climate Ma!ers: Ethics in a Warming World (2012), Broome argues that principally governments and public institutions, but also individuals, have an ethical obligation to present and future people to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to work on applied ethics and ethical theory, Broome has been an central figure in recent work on normativity and rationality. His early papers (see, e.g. 'Normative Requirements', Ratio (1999)) stress the importance of focusing on oughts in addition to reasons and jointly form the contemporary locus classicus for a defense of the wide-scope view of rational requirements. Subsequent work by Broome emphasizes the independence of rationality from normative reasons, sets out the logic of requirements, and explores the nature of theoretical and practical reasoning. He develops a comprehensive account of rationality and reasoning in Rationality through Reasoning (2013).