Ralf Bader Fellow of Merton College, CUF Lecturer - University of Oxford |
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01.04.2014-30.04.2014
Procreation or Extension?: Value-Based Approaches to Health Care Resource Allocation
The most general goal during our visit to Brocher is to develop a philosophical framework for value-based allocation rules that allow us to answer the question how procreation is to be compared with life extension, how adding new lives compares with extending and improving existing lives. This will be achieved by combining philosophical analysis with formal tools from economics to address foundational issues that form the basis of everyday problems and dilemmas faced by policy makers and health care practitioners. This general goal will be achieved by pursuing two specific objectives. The first is to critically assess (1) the existing philosophical literature on the value of adding a new person to the world and (2) the clinical literature on the health benefits from IVF treatment. The second is to propose a formal model which allows for the ethically sound comparison between the expected good of adding a new person to the world and the expected good of extending the life of an existing person. Bader and Hirose studied both economics and philosophy, and combine the analytical methods of welfare economics and philosophy in order to analyze the ethical issues arising from the distribution of scarce health care resources. We have been collaborating on the project on the aggregation of health benefits in the case of variable population sizes. Our specific objectives will be pursued by utilizing these two analytical methods.