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.

In response to Roemer's reformulation of the Marxian concept of exploitation in terms of comparative wealth distributions (1982, 1996), Vrousalis (2013) treats economic exploitation as an explicitly relational phenomenon in which one party takes advantage of the other's economic vulnerability in order to extract a net benefit. This paper offers a critical assessment of Vrousalis's account, prompting a revised formulation that is analysed in the context of a matching and bargaining model. This analysis yields precise representations of Vrousalis's conditions of economic vulnerability and economic exploitation and facilitates comparison to the alternative conceptions of Marx and Roemer.

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.

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.

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.

According to Hobbes, individuals care about their relative standing in a way that shapes their social interactions. To model this aspect of Hobbesian psychology, this paper supposes that agents have social preferences, that is, preferences about their comparative resource holdings. Introducing uncertainty regarding the social preferences of others unleashes a process of trust-unravelling, ultimately leading to Hobbes’s ‘state of war’. This Trust-unravelling Model incorporates important features of Hobbes’s argument that past models ignore.

This article presents a fairness principle for evaluating decision-making based on predictions: a decision rule is unfair when the individuals directly impacted by the decisions who are equal with respect to the features that justify inequalities in outcomes do not have the same statistical prospects of being benefited or harmed by them, irrespective of their socially salient morally arbitrary traits. The principle can be used to evaluate prediction-based decision-making from the point of view of a wide range of antecedently specified substantive views about justice in outcome distributions.