The Value of a Life-Year and the Intuition of Universality

Marc Fleurbaey and Gregory Ponthiere

PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) from HAL

Abstract: When considering the social valuation of a life-year, there is a conflict between two basic intuitions: on the one hand, the intuition of universality, according to which the value of an additional life-year should be universal, and, as such, should be invariant to the context considered; on the other hand, the intuition of complementarity, according to which the value of a life-year should depend on what this extra-life-year allows for, and, hence, on the quality of that life-year, because the quantity of life and the quality of life are complement to each other. This paper proposes three distinct accounts of the intuition of universality, and shows that those accounts either conflict with a basic monotonicity property, or lead to indifference with respect to how life-years are distributed within the population. Those results support the abandon of the intuition of universality. But abandoning the intuition of universality does not prevent a social evaluator from giving priority, when allocating life-years, to individuals with the lowest quality of life.

Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-hea
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03907536v1
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2022, 22 (3), pp.355-381. ⟨10.26556/jesp.v22i3.1768⟩

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Related works:
Working Paper: The Value of a Life-Year and the Intuition of Universality (2022)
Working Paper: The Value of a Life-Year and the Intuition of Universality (2019)
Working Paper: The Value of a Life-Year and the Intuition of Universality (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:pseptp:hal-03907536

DOI: 10.26556/jesp.v22i3.1768

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