The Sufficientarian Alternative: A Commentary on Setting Health-Care Priorities

• Authors: Zameska Jay A.
• Languages of publication: PL EN

Abstracts

EN

In this commentary on Torbjörn Tännsjö’s Setting Health-Care Priorities, I argue that sufficientarianism provides a valuable perspective in considering how to set health care priorities. I claim that pace Tännsjö, sufficientarianism does offer a distinct alternative to prioritarianism. To demonstrate this, I introduce sufficientarianism and distinguish two forms: Tännsjö’s “weak sufficientarianism” and an alternative strong form of sufficientarianism that I call “revised lexical sufficientarianism.” I raise a problem for Tännsjö’s sufficientarianism, and advocate for the revised view on this basis. I then demonstrate that in the area of population ethics, the revised view outperforms the other views Tännsjö considers. As such, I aim to demonstrate that sufficientarianism — understood as its own theory and not just as a form of prioritarianism — offers unique advantages in population ethics, and would have been a valuable complement to the other theories Tännsjö considers.

Keywords

EN

priority setting health-care sufficientarianism distributive ethics Torbjörn Tännsjö Setting Health-Care Priorities population ethics repugnant conclusion utilitarianism maximin/leximin

• Publisher: Instytut Filozofii - Uniwersytet Jagielloński
• Journal: Diametros
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 68
• Pages: 14

Dates

published

2020-01

Contributors

author

Zameska Jay A.

• University of Tartu

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Identifiers

DOI

doi.org/10.33392/diam.1605