Philosophy, et cetera

It's now widely recognized that problematic discrimination need not involve malicious attitudes: certain political structures might syst...

Hopefully the financial situation for universities next year will turn out to be less dire than many fear. And hopefully what cost-cutting m...

When thinking about triage situations, it's common for people to assume that saving lives  (as many of them as possible) should be our m...

... is my paper, ' Against "Saving Lives": Equal Concern and Differential Impact ' [ pdf ]. It draws on many of my previ...

Appeals to quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) in medical resource allocation decisions are naturally supported by a broadly utilitarian vi...

My paper ' Against "Saving Lives": Equal Concern and Differential Impact ' defends the use of QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life...

I've previously discussed  Harris (1987)'s famous objection that the use of Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) in medical resource ...

Here's an interesting moral controversy (which my brother brought to my attention).  Suppose that: (1) There are more English-speaking ...

Erik Nord, in ' Values for Health States in QALYs and DALYs: Desirability versus Well-Being and Worth ', writes (p.126): I define ...

Suppose we have a severe shortage of a drug that is prescribed on a "grams per kilogram" basis, i.e. a 300 pound patient needs thr...

According to the "Rule of Rescue", we ought to do all we can to save the lives of identifiable people at risk (e.g. trapped miners...

As I've written before : We talk a lot about 'saving lives', but we shouldn't -- it's really quite misleading. At best...

Macklin and Cowan's (2012) ' Given financial constraints, it would be unethical to divert antiretroviral drugs from treatment to pre...

Persad et al's ' Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions '* offers interesting criticisms of existing theories...

Reading the American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs ,* I'm struck by their opposition to making fine-...

In 'QALYfing the value of life' ( J. Med. Ethics , 1987), John Harris claims that it is unjust "discrimination" to allocat...

Here's a misleading headline for you: ' Treatment based on need not age ': "The BMA is against blanket bans based on age or...

Newsflash: health policy and medical practice are value-laden, and may involve tradeoffs. That should hardly be news. Yet there are doctors ...