Pandemic prioritarianism.
J Med Ethics
; 48(4): 236-239, 2022 04.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1066925
ABSTRACT
Prioritarianism pertains to the generic idea that it matters more to benefit people, the worse off they are, and while prioritarianism is not uncontroversial, it is considered a generally plausible and widely shared distributive principle often applied to healthcare prioritisation. In this paper, I identify social justice prioritarianism, severity prioritarianism and age-weighted prioritarianism as three different interpretations of the general prioritarian idea and discuss them in light of the effect of pandemic consequences on healthcare priority setting. On this analysis, the paper arrives at the following three conclusions:
(1) that we have strong prioritarian reasons for special concern about the vulnerable and socially disadvantaged in reference to pandemic effects, (2) that severity of illness is an important factor in identifying the worse off in priority setting but that this must not over-ride the special priority to the socially disadvantaged and (3) that the maximisation rationale of the age-weighted view runs against the core prioritarian idea, and the age-weighted prioritarianism is thus unfitting as a prioritarian response to the COVID-19 case.Keywords
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Pandemics
/
COVID-19
Type of study:
Prognostic study
/
Randomized controlled trials
Limits:
Humans
Language:
English
Journal:
J Med Ethics
Year:
2022
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Medethics-2020-106910
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