Böcker i Population-Level Bioethics-serien

Human beings show a greater inclination to assist persons identified as being at high risk of great harm than to assist persons who will suffer similar harm but are not identified as yet. Does this effect constitute a virtue, or a vice? What explains the effect? What are the implications for policy?

Which inequalities in longevity and health among individuals, groups, and nations are unfair? And what priority should health policy attach to narrowing them? These essays by philosophers, economists, epidemiologists, and physicians attempt to determine how health inequalities should be conceptualized, measured, ranked, and evaluated.

In this volume, leading philosophers, medical doctors, and health economists discuss the evaluation of death and its relevance for global health policy. The authors challenge the current practice of assessing newborn deaths as the worst deaths. The volume also discusses whether stillbirths should be included in our evaluation of deaths, and whether the deaths of young children are worse than that of newborns.

The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) is one of the largest-scale research collaborations in global health, distilling a wide range of health information to provide estimates and projections for more than 350 diseases, injuries, and risk factors in 195 countries. Its results are a critical tool informing researchers, policy-makers, and others working to promote health around the globe. A study like the GBD is, of course, extremely complex from an empirical perspective. But it also raises a large number of complex ethical and philosophical questions that have been explored in a series of collaborations over the past twenty years among epidemiologists, philosophers, economists, and policy scholars. The essays in this volume address issues of current and urgent concern to the GBD and other epidemiological studies, including rival understandings of causation, the aggregation ofcomplex health data, temporal discounting, age-weighting, and the valuation of health states. The volume concludes with a set of chapters discussing how epidemiological data should and should not be used. Better appreciating the philosophical dimensions of a study like the GBD can make possible a more sophisticated interpretation of its results, and it can improve epidemiological studies in the future, so that they are better suited to produce results that can help us to improve global health.

How Health Care Can Be Cost-Effective and Fair considers how healthcare can be both cost-effective and ethical. Daniel M. Hausman defends a major role for cost-effective reasoning in healthcare distribution, while also recognizing its serious limitations.