Some writers have noted that valuation is often focused on foreseen changes. They say that we often don't value situations in terms of what we would have in them only but also in terms of the gains or losses that they offer us — that we then focus on departures from our status quo. They argue that such thinking conflicts with basic economic analysis, and also that it violates logic: they say that it is irrational. I agree that it seems to be common. But is such a way of setting one's values a challenge to economics? And does it conflict with being rational?

Rationing health care by ordeals is likely to have different effects on women and men, and on distinct groups of women. I show how such putative effects of ordeals are relevant to achieving gender justice. I explain why some ordeals may disproportionately set back women’s interest in discretionary time, health and access to health care, and may undermine equality of opportunity for positions of advantage. Some ordeals protect the interests of the worse-off women yet set back the interests of better-off women in equal opportunities. I suggest how we can use ordeal design to advance particular aims of gender justice.

In the first half of the 1970s, two books appeared which have subsequently been regarded as major works in political philosophy: John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), and Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Economists have devoted a considerable amount of ink to commentary, pro and con, on A Theory of Justice; and it is getting to be a rare public finance textbook that does not, in its discussion of governmental redistribution, describe the Kantian contract made behind the veil of ignorance. On the other hand, while Nozick has not exactly been ignored, economists have not joined the debate over Anarchy, State, and Utopia with the same gusto. When economists have joined the debate, their concern has been, more often than not, with Nozick's entitlement theory of distributive justice, as is the case with Varian (1975) and Sen (1977). What is largely missing, then, is any economic analysis of the processes that give rise to Nozick's morally legitimate state, which he calls the minimal state, and the characteristics and likely activities of the minimal state within the moral boundaries set by Nozick, his assertions to the contrary notwithstanding.

Consider a sequence of outcomes of descending value, A > B > C > . . . > Z. According to Larry Temkin, there are reasons to deny the continuity axiom in certain ‘extreme’ cases, i.e. cases of triplets of outcomes A, B and Z, where A and B differ little in value, but B and Z differ greatly. But, Temkin argues, if we assume continuity for ‘easy’ cases, i.e. cases where the loss is small, we can derive continuity for the ‘extreme’ case by applying the axiom of substitution and the axiom of transitivity. The rejection of continuity for ‘extreme’ cases therefore renders the triad of continuity in ‘easy’ cases, the axiom of substitution and the axiom of transitivity inconsistent.

As shown by Arrhenius and Rabinowitz, Temkin's argument is flawed. I present a result which is stronger than their alternative proof of an inconsistency. However, this result is not quite what Temkin intends, because it only refers to an ordinal ranking of the outcomes in the sequence, whereas Temkin appeals to intuitions about the size of gains and losses. Against this background, it is argued that Temkin's trilemma never gets off the ground. This is because Temkin appeals to two mutually inconsistent conceptions of aggregation of value. Once these are clearly separated, it will transpire, in connection with each of them, that one of the principles to be rejected does not appear plausible. Hence, there is nothing surprising or challenging about the result; it is merely a corollary to Expected Utility Theory.

Economic ordeals are allocation mechanisms that impose non-financial ‘deadweight costs to qualify for a transfer’ (Nichols and Zeckhauser 1982: 372). Examples include long waiting times, travel and form-filling as conditions for certain healthcare services. Appropriately designed, ordeals can enhance target efficiency so that the goods being allocated better reach the intended recipients. The logic behind this is simple: ‘Say one welfare eligible would receive 100 utiles from a particular transfer, yet another would receive only 10. Then an ordeal that imposes an 11 utile loss in order to qualify for the transfer will be an effective sorting device’ (Nichols and Zeckhauser 1982: 376). In other words, recipients who would receive smaller benefits are expected to be dissuaded by the ordeal and refrain from requesting the good, whereas recipients who would receive larger benefits from the transfer are expected to seek out the good even if there is a deadweight cost. Moreover, unlike financial participation, which can similarly dissuade users with relatively little to gain from the good in question, ordeals are in no direct way financially regressive: the poor are not necessarily more dissuaded by losing time or by having to fill in a form than the rich are.

This paper addresses the issue of finite versus countable additivity in Bayesian probability and decision theory – in particular, Savage’s theory of subjective expected utility and personal probability. I show that Savage’s reason for not requiring countable additivity in his theory is inconclusive. The assessment leads to an analysis of various highly idealized assumptions commonly adopted in Bayesian theory, where I argue that a healthy dose of, what I call, conceptual realism is often helpful in understanding the interpretational value of sophisticated mathematical structures employed in applied sciences like decision theory. In the last part, I introduce countable additivity into Savage’s theory and explore some technical properties in relation to other axioms of the system.

On the face of it, the protracted public controversy over abortion in the United States and elsewhere might seem to rest on intractable normative questions inaccessible to economic analysis. But an influential early essay in the now sizable philosophical literature on the subject suggests otherwise. Judith Jarvis Thomson (1971) disarmingly inclined toward the view that “the fetus has already become a human person well before birth”,. presumably with all the rights pertaining thereto. She denied, however, that such rights necessarily include use of the mother's womb until birth. To illustrate her point, she compared the mother's situation to that, for example, of an unwilling Good Samaritan with a uniquely suited blood type, who is forced to share a kidney for 9 months with a famous, ailing violinist who needed its use for that duration to recover. Even if the life of a human being was at stake, the assertion of rights for the violinist or the fetus, she argued, would be too degrading for either the Good Samaritan's or the mother's status as a person, where large unwanted sacrifices would be required. Reduced to its economic essentials, the argument is that the mother has property rights to her own body, including the right to expel a “trespasser”. who would die as a consequence. Thus, the antiabortion position is neatly undercut by granting its major premise (the humanity of the fetus) while denying its conclusion.

Without doubt, Weighing Lives, like its precursor, Weighing Goods, is an excellent and thought-provoking piece of work. In the first place, it addresses a question of the most fundamental importance, namely: how should we aggregate the well-being of past, present and future members of the human race under the various possible states of the world that may, in the event, prevail? This involves, amongst other things, dealing with questions of aggregation across time, people and different states of the world; the issue of what constitutes a “neutral” state of well-being (i.e., one neither better nor worse than not being alive) and what is, in fact, the value of continuing to survive.

It is regretted that the originally published paper (doi:10.1017/S0266267111000010, published online 22 June 2011) was not the author's final amended version. We apologise for this oversight and reproduce the entire corrected paper here in print and online, with revised notation.

In order to account for non-traditional preference relations the present paper develops a new, richer framework for preference relations. This new framework provides characterizations of non-traditional preference relations, such as incommensurateness and instability, that may hold when neither preference nor indifference do. The new framework models relations with swaps, which are conceived of as transfers from one alternative state to another. The traditional framework analyses dyadic preference relations in terms of a hypothetical choice between the two compared alternatives. The swap framework extends this approach by analysing dyadic preference relations in terms of two hypothetical choices: the choice between keeping the first of the compared alternatives or swapping it for the second; and the choice between keeping the second alternative or swapping it for the first.

This is a wonderful book; indeed, it is easily one of the most important and creative books I have ever read on the subject of causation and causal inference. Causality is impressive on many levels and should be of great interest to many different audiences. Philosophers will find of particular interest Pearl's defense of what might be described as a broadly manipulationist or interventionist treatment of causation: Causal claims have to do with what would happen under ideal, suitably surgical experimental manipulations (‘interventions’). But Pearl moves far beyond philosophical generalities on this theme: He makes the case for the approach that he favors by developing a formal apparatus (‘a calculus of interventions’, as he calls it) for talking about interventions and how they relate to causation and information about probabilities that is at once both intuitively compelling and genuinely useful for purposes of calculation and estimation. He also actively engages the philosophical literature on causation at many points – for example, there are illuminating discussions of evidential decision theory, of probabilistic theories of causation of the sort favored by Eells and Cartwright, of Lewisian counterfactual theories of causation, and of the relationship between so-called type and token causal claims, as well as a quite novel treatment of the latter.

In a school choice problem, each school has a priority ordering over the set of students. These orderings depend on criteria such as whether a student lives within walking distance or has a sibling at the school. A priority ordering provides a ranking of students but nothing more. I argue that this information is sufficient when priority is based on merit but not when priority is based on criteria such as walking distance. I propose an extended formulation of the problem wherein a ‘priority matrix’, indicating which criteria are satisfied by each student-school pair, replaces the usual priority orderings.