One brief paper in this collection dates from long ago, but the rest were all first published in the 1990s. Most of my earlier writings in economics and ethics formed part of the long development of my book Weighing Goods, and whatever truth I thought they contained was eventually incorporated into the book. Weighing Goods offered an account of the structure of good, but it left many questions unanswered. One is the question of the value of life: the value of extending a person's life and the value of creating a new life. How do these fit into the structure of good? How, too, do incommensurable values fit into this structure? What about the value of future goods? Most of this present book represents my work towards answering these and other questions about the structure of good that I previously left unanswered.

I have always known how useful the techniques of economists can be in ethical theory, but recent years have taught me how important it is to propagate this message amongst philosophers. This book is part of my campaign of propagation. I hope economists will find it useful too, since it deals with practical and theoretical topics that concern them as well as philosophers. Some of the papers collected here were originally published in philosophers' books and journals, others in economists' journals. Inevitably, the economists' papers take for granted some terminology and assumptions that philosophers may find puzzling, and the philosophers' papers may raise some similar puzzles for economists. But I hope these difficulties will not be so severe as to prevent anyone from understanding the arguments, except perhaps in one or two of the more technical papers.