The dust jacket of this book (OUP 2004) says:

"We are often faced with choices that involve the weighing of people's lives against each other, or the weighing of lives against other good things. These are choices both for individuals and for societies. A person who is terminally ill may have to choose between palliative care and more aggressive treatment, which will give her a longer life but at some cost in suffering. We have to choose between the convenience to ourselves of road and air travel, and the lives of the future people who will be killed by the global warming we cause, through violent weather, tropical disease, and heatwaves…
How should we weight lives? Weighing Lives develops a theoretical basis for answering this practical question…
Not only philosophers, but also economists and political theorists concerned with the practical question of valuing life, should find the book's conclusions important for their work."

To be quite explicit: Weighing Lives is not a book for the terminally ill, but rather for those who decide on their behalf. The following observations, on the other hand, are from the point of view of someone who stands a fair chance of being terminally ill one day, so don't expect a clear presentation of John Broome's argument, or even a fair one: all I'm concerned with is the points where I part company with him, and why. It is not an easy book, but it is very clear, especially at those points where the author is not sure of his ground. For example:

"All I can do now is consider in turn various objections to the principle of temporal good. Each will call on some putative value that is inconsistent with the principle. Each will be a rather low-level specific theory, rather than a general principle. With each, I shall have to try and judge whether it is indeed a genuine value. I find this difficult. These judgements generally have to be based on nothing more than a specific intuition. I find my own intuitions on such specific matters can easily dissolve under pressure. I do not trust them." (p.223)

I love that clarity and precision: it's like watching an expert skier. I'll flounder after him at some distance.

Chapter 2: Some technical matters;
Chapter 2.1 The betterness ordering.
"I said in chapter 1 that the problem is to discover, amongst distributions, which is better than which. Betterness - comparative goodness - is all that matters in this book; we need not concern ourselves with any other aspect of goodness. We need not worry whether some distributions are absolutely good or bad in any sense. Nor need we worry about the amount by which one distribution is better or worse than another.
"Indeed, in so far as either of these worries goes beyond questions about betterness, I doubt it even makes good sense. I doubt there is anything more to the idea of goodness than betterness. If we knew which things were better than which, we would have nothing more to know about the goodness of things. But at any rate, whether or not there are further questions to be asked about goodness, this book is concerned with betterness only." (p.20)

Cut out good and the weighing of lives comes down to intuition regulated by algebra. This calls for a clear apprehension of one's intuitions and a good grasp of the maths; John Broome has both. I say that with more confidence than I could justify: my own maths is primitive and I can't vouch for anyone else's apprehension of their own intuitions. But I know the author a little, I heard him once philosophise with his peers, and I recognise that well-tempered voice of his as I read this second book (the earlier volume, Weighing Goods, I have not read). I believe what he says.

On the face of it, the expulsion of good should make it easier to secure consensus: if we can't agree on an absolute, we might at least agree on specific relative merits, "betterness". However, since our intuitions probably draw on primal instincts as to good, I don't think that's likely. And although that really doesn't matter in the book, it matters on the dust jacket and it matters in practice.

By way of illustration, take my own disagreement with two of the intuitions espoused by the author. There is one he holds so dear that he asserts it many times in three pages (108-110). I'm quoting so much that OUP is going to be on to me for royalties, so I'd better concertina JB's argument a little. At this point in the book he is comparing four situations, A,B,C and D, in which various bods are or are not alive and kicking.

"A and D each has a particular advantage over B and C. They each contain one long life rather than two short lives. In A, p continues to live through both times, whereas in B she dies and is replaced by q. We normally think it better that a person continues to live rather than that she is replaced. So intuitively A may well be better than B and also D better than C… It is surely true that our intuition normally rates continued life better than replacement (there follow the examples of a baby and a centenarian, ) "But we take prolonging life to be better than saving life in some cases, and that is enough to contradict separability of times." (I don't see how that follows, but I'll let that go, since it doesn't affect my own argument.)
"To put it differently, we intuitively value longevity, at least within limits… We normally value longevity."
The following section begins:
"The objection I raised against separability is based only on the intuitive thought that longevity is valuable. One possible response to this objection is simply to deny it. This is a hard-headed, intuitively implausible response, but it is possible… The separatist opinion that horizontal connections make no difference [horizontal connections in the example mean continuity of life. PMcC.] is an extreme version of the view that personal identity does not matter.
"I think separatism is a defensible view. However, it is innately implausible."
That's eight assertions in three pages. JB follows up by labelling those who object to his view "complete utilitarians". "A complete utilitarian does not care in any way about how wellbeing is distributed. For one thing, she does not care how it is packaged into individual lives. All that matters is wellbeing; who gets wellbeing is irrelevant." Now, I don't know what standing complete utilitarians have in the philosophical community these days, but I suspect it's not high. I make that eight-and-a-half side-swipes in three pages.

In contradicting JB, I might simply resort to his own method on this issue: bald assertion. But the edifice he has founded on his intuitions gives him the benefit of the doubt: there is something fiducial about technical prowess, whereas I might simply be out to cause trouble. So I had better try to account for my own, contrary intuition, which has nothing utilitarian about it.

JB prefers one long life to two short ones; it's not that I regard the matter with indifference, but rather that I think two short lives, very often, are better than one long one.

I have known people whose biological life far outran their taste for it. I have worked in places where people don't last long at all. With the integration of the world economy, the doddering rich are stealing years from the poor. This is not leading up to a crude dollar argument. After all, a recent happiness survey found Bangladeshis to be the happiest nation on earth. My point is this: humans are rarely alive. Many people, given good health, are dulled by routine and eroded by anxiety at the prospect of it ending. Many more are struggling to reach that level of wellbeing. Once in a while, in moments of unbearable happiness or when pain jerks us out of the rut, we are alive, and that is good. Indeed, nothing else is worth a bean. (This is related to the T'ang poet's dictum that government and the laws exist in order to make room for poetry to flourish.)
I don't believe that extending life will increase the number of those moments, but there is a better than even chance that adding a life will add an opportunity to be alive. Given the general shortage of resources, this should not be interpreted as an injunction to go forth and multiply, leaving granny to her fate. Indeed, I am completely opposed to integrating my intuition in any theory that weighs lives. More on that later.
Is this enough to establish that I seriously maintain the conclusion JB holds to be intuitively implausible? For those who agree with me, it will be; it might give the others pause.

A further instance of intuitive disagreement: "how things are for a person", or "life" for short. In this part of JB's argument, "life" includes "all the features of the world that can affect her wellbeing" (p94).
"could the very same life be lived by more than one person? The question is not whether there is a life such that one person could live it, and also such that another person could live it. I assume that is possible. It is not physically possible, but conceptually or metaphysically possible. This means I assume that a person's identity is not a part of what I call her life, or of how things are for the person. I assume a person's identity does not show up from her personal perspective." (pp94-5)

This is about the only moment in the book where I feel cheated: metaphysics is given the red card on p20 along with the good, then it is sneaked back onto the pitch in the second half to make a decisive cross.

"Think of all possible people together. If two of them share at least two possible lives, call them an "overlapping pair". I assume that everyone belongs to at least one overlapping pair, and furthermore that everyone is linked to everyone else by a chain of overlapping pairs. This is just as much as I need to assume about the extent to which lives can be lived by more than one person. Once we recognize that some lives can be lived by more than one person, the first part of this assumption is hard to doubt." (p96)

This time I am not going to argue the point: that two people could live the same life is intuitively implausible, innately implausible and an extreme version of the view that personal identity does not matter. Dixi.
Unfortunately, the formula for weighing lives seems to depend on the above assumption. It may be that the theory could be adjusted so as to assuage my dismay, but my objection to the whole approach is not a matter of one intuition or another, but the way intuitions are deployed.

Chapter 4: Features of goodness
4.1 The transitivity of betterness.
In the subsection on large numbers, JB answers arguments by Larry Temkin and Stuart Rachels.
"Temkin asks us to start by making Il, a very severe illness, such as AIDS, and Ik a very mild one, such as a mild headache for a short time. This is meant to give us property (a) since Temkin finds curing a single person of AIDS intuitively so important that it is better than curing any number of short, mild headaches. Then we set up a sequence of illnesses ranging in severity between AIDS and a short, mild headache, each one just a little bit less severe than the previous one in the sequence. Provided we make the gaps in severity small enough, we can ensure that saving some number of people from any illness in the sequence is better than saving, say, one-tenth the number from the previous illness in the sequence. So saving ten people from the second illness in the sequence is better than saving one person from AIDS. Saving a hundred people from the third illness is better than saving ten from the second, and so on. Now we have property (b). All this is supposed to be on grounds of intuition.
"I am not myself at all inclined to make cyclical judgements about this example. I do indeed believe there is a sequence of illnesses linking AIDS and a short, mild headache that satisfy property (b). I believe this, not on intuitive grounds, but because it follows from arguments made later in this book. Consequently, because betterness is transitive, I believe there is some number (which is very large) such that curing that number of people of a short, mild headache is better than curing one person of AIDS. I have no inclination to believe the opposite.
"However, Temkin and Rachels do believe the opposite. Rachels tells us that the opposite view 'is supported by the strong preference of competent judges'. Temkin lists a number of famous philosophers who think like him. The view of these competent judges and famous philosophers deserves a response.
"Their view is founded on their intuitions. But we are dealing with very large numbers of people, and we have no reason to trust anyone's intuitions about very large numbers, however excellent their philosophy. Even the best philosophers cannot get an intuitive grasp of, say, tens of billions of people. That is no criticism; these numbers are beyond intuition. But these philosophers ought not to think their intuition can tell them the truth about such large numbers of people." (pp56-7)

I note in passing that I side with JB on the transitivity of betterness: apart from anything else, if betterness is not transitive, philosophers had better look for an alternative to logic in support of their arguments. Nevertheless, attentive or flippant readers may have noticed Stalin in the background, sniggering about tragedy and statistics. (the death of one man is tragedy; the death of a million is statistics.) By dismissing the notion of good, JB is able to turn a deaf ear to that.

Many - philosophers and others - would agree that their intuition can't tell them the truth about such large numbers of people (though tens of billions is a bit much). But intuition can tell them the truth about individuals. The relevant intuition, the fundamental instinct that falls through considerations of betterness like a stone through cloud, is that it is not good to kill someone or let them die for a trivial reason, or for any number of trivial reasons.
At this point, I must move to the first person. The fact is that I do kill people for trivial reasons. I am killing all the time in what I eat and how I travel. I can always kill less, but I can't stop completely: give the tramp some money and he drinks himself to death; give him nothing and he starves. I don't see how any theory could reconcile JB's logic with Temkin's intuition, even though I believe both are correct. The physical causes of death are clear, and the reasons for it: we die because we kill. The contradiction gets resolved not in theory but in death, for most of us; I guess. But there are cases - children killed before they can hurt a fly - where there is a cause but no reason. This is the realm of tragedy, where there is good and its opposite, but no scales in which to weigh them.

I was tempted to cite JB's discussion of Epicurus as an example of what can go wrong when you drop intuition in favour of theory, but I suspect there's a Pythonesque pince-sans-rire in his argument, so I'll let it ride. I succumb, however, to the temptation to quote Morton Feldman on musical composition.
"One of the problems about functional harmony is that it hears for us, see. We no longer have to hear. We are the found object, you see, where it's listening for us. Harmony is like going to a public accountant to do certain work. Or it hears for us, it's fantastic, it's marvelous, we don't have to hear anymore. But we have to be smart. We have to be smart, like Mozart, to make sure that it's the best kind of harmony that's working for him." ("The Future of Local Music" (1984), XVIII, in Give my Regards to Eighth Street (Cambridge, 2000)).

As I mentioned earlier, there is a fiducial quality in technique. The other side of that coin is that technique can become a substitute for being smart, as Feldman puts it. John Broome continues: "For very large numbers, we have to rely on theory, not intuition. When people first built bridges, they managed without much theory. They could judge a log by eye, relying on their intuition. Their intuitions were reliable, being built on long experience with handling wood and stone. But when people started spanning broad rivers with steel and concrete, their intuition failed them, and they had to resort to engineering theory and careful calculations. The cables that support suspension bridges are unintuitively slender" (p57)

Stalin again: the engineers of human souls. In philosophy, as in music, if you rely on theory to the exclusion of intuition you won't even know when you are wreaking havoc. A formula for weighing lives is not a bridge: it's not those who trust to its strength whose lives are at risk: it's those on whom the formula is used, who have no say in the matter until it's too late.

WeighingLives is part of the drive to automation that goes from the Jacquard loom to computers, from Taylorism to Microsoft Project, from Kircher to Babelfish. At the crude and impersonal level on which a finance ministry works, this book ought to improve the consistency and clarity of distribution. It's a good thing. Still, the automation of human functions is a demonstration of Zeno's paradox: the arrow never will reach its target. We're incurable.