Abstract

Longevity is valuable. Most of us would agree that it’s bad to die when you could go on living, and death’s badness has to do with the value your life would have if it continued. Most of us would also agree that it’s bad if life expectancy in a country is low, it’s bad if there is high infant mortality and it’s bad if there is a wide mortality gap between different groups in a population. But how can we make such judgments more precise? How should we evaluate the harm of mortality in a population? Although philosophers have written a lot about the harm of death for individuals, very little work has been done on the harm of mortality for populations. In this article, I take the first steps towards developing a theory of the harm of population mortality. Even these first steps, I argue, lead to surprising results.