Bykvist, Krister | 2015
in: Weighing and Reasoning. Themes from the Philosophy of John Broome, Eds.Iwao Hirose and Andrew Reisner, Oxford University Press.
This chapter discusses the question of whether we can make it better for a person by creating her. It argues that John Broome’s argument for a negative answer to this question can be improved upon to avoid some recent criticisms. Instead of being concerned with whether a state of affairs that is better for you would be better for you if it obtained, we should ask whether it could make things better for you. It is also shown that these criticisms assume a mistaken idea about what it means to say that abstract states of affairs have value. The correct idea is that valuable states of affairs are possible value-makers of the world.
