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

Bibliographic Data

ID19035233
AuthorsMarc Fleurbaey (0000-0002-5342-8065, Paris School of Economics, corresponding author), Gregory Ponthiere (0000-0001-7023-7642, UCLouvain)
Year2022
Volume22
Issue3
Pages355-381
Publication date2022-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1559-3061 • E-ISSN: 1559-3061
PublisherJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.26556/jesp.v22i3.1768
OpenAlexW2992018965
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited13

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

Epistemology · Intuition · Physics · Economic theories and models · Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth · Income, Poverty, and Inequality · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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