Course Descriptions

This seminar will be devoted to distributive ethics, with an eye toward the implications for the distribution of health and health care. The first two-thirds of the course will focus on questions concerning risk: Is the distribution of risk between individuals itself of normative importance, in addition to the distribution of bad outcomes between them? What values do lotteries have? What if outcomes, although unknown, are causally determined? Is it fair to allow a few people to face large risks of death in order to prevent small risks of death to a very large number of people, which will lead to more total deaths? Does it matter whether it is determined who among those subjected to the small risks would die? What distribution of harms and of risks does fairness demand and should an egalitarian defend?

he last third of the course will critically review multiple recent interpretations of egalitarianism with respect to health, health risks, and health care. It will consider what would constitute an egalitarian distribution of health and health care, whether the focus with respect to health should be on its distribution among individuals or on the correlations between health disparities and other inequalities, or whether indeed the focus should be on distribution at all rather than on the resulting character of the relations among individuals. To what extent does individual responsibility justify inequalities in health and health care? What constitutes egalitarian health care?