33 found
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  1. Fair equality of chances for prediction-based decisions.Michele Loi, Anders Herlitz & Hoda Heidari - forthcoming - Economics and Philosophy:1-24.
    This article presents a fairness principle for evaluating decision-making based on predictions: a decision rule is unfair when the individuals directly impacted by the decisions who are equal with respect to the features that justify inequalities in outcomes do not have the same statistical prospects of being benefited or harmed by them, irrespective of their socially salient morally arbitrary traits. The principle can be used to evaluate prediction-based decision-making from the point of view of a wide range of antecedently specified (...)
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  2.  71
    The indispensability of sufficientarianism.Anders Herlitz - 2019 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 22 (7):929-942.
    In this paper, I argue that sufficientarian principles are indispensable in the set of principles that have bearing on issues in distributive ethics. I provide two arguments in favor of this claim. First, I argue that sufficientarianism is the only framework that allows us to appropriately analyze what sort of obligations we have toward individuals who are badly off due to their own faults and choices. Second, I argue that sufficientarianism is the only theory that provides an adequate framework for (...)
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  3.  58
    Classifying comparability problems in a way that matters.Anders Herlitz & Henrik Andersson - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-19.
    How should one understand comparisons in which neither of two alternatives is at least as good as the other? Much recent literature on comparability problems focuses on what the appropriate explanation of the phenomenon is. Is it due to vagueness or the possibility of non-conventional comparative relations such as parity? This paper argues that the discussions on how to best explain comparability problems has reached an impasse at which it is hard to make any progress. To advance the discussion we (...)
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  4.  69
    Nondeterminacy, Two-Step Models, and Justified Choice.Anders Herlitz - 2018 - Ethics 129 (2):284-308.
    This article analyzes approaches to nondeterminacy that suggest that one can make justified choices when primary criteria fail to fully determine a best alternative by introducing a secondary criterion. It is shown that these approaches risk violating Basic Contraction Consistency. Some ways of adjusting two-step models in order to protect against this are addressed, and it is suggested that proponents of two-step models should adopt formal conditions which qualify what counts as a permissible secondary criterion that resemble supervaluationist conditions that (...)
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  5.  24
    ‘Green’ bioethics widens the scope of eligible values and overrides patient demand: comment on Parker.Anders Herlitz, Erik Malmqvist & Christian Munthe - 2023 - Journal of Medical Ethics 49 (2):100-101.
    Parker’s article is a welcome attempt to address the importance of environmental sustainability in the realm of clinical ethics.1 We support the recent movement to seriously consider the environmental impact of healthcare institutions in bioethics.2 3 Still, we find two partly linked weaknesses of Parker’s analysis and guideline suggestion. These relate to a need in ‘green’ bioethics to see beyond the normal healthcare ethical focus on health-related values related to individual patients, and to primarily adopt institutional ways of framing central (...)
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  6.  57
    Nondeterminacy, cycles and rational choice.Anders Herlitz - 2020 - Analysis 80 (3):443-449.
    A notorious problem that has recently received increased attention in axiology, normative theory and population ethics is the apparent ubiquity of what can be generally called nondeterminacy. This paper illustrates how nondeterminacy can spawn cyclical rankings. So, accepting that practical reasons can admit of nondeterminacy challenges the widely held idea that ‘better than’ is transitive. As a result, standard approaches to rational choice under nondeterminacy fail to be action-guiding, since in some situations all options are dominated, that is, impermissible according (...)
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  7.  42
    Against lifetime QALY prioritarianism.Anders Herlitz - 2018 - Journal of Medical Ethics 44 (2):109-113.
    Lifetime quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) prioritarianism has recently been defended as a reasonable specification of the prioritarian view that benefits to the worse off should be given priority in health-related priority setting. This paper argues against this view with reference to how it relies on implausible assumptions. By referring to lifetime QALY as the basis for judgments about who is worse off lifetime QALY prioritarianism relies on assumptions of strict additivity, atomism and intertemporal separability of sublifetime attributes. These assumptions entail that (...)
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  8.  18
    Value Incommensurability: Ethics, Risk. And Decision-Making.Henrik Andersson & Anders Herlitz (eds.) - 2021 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    Incommensurability is the impossibility to determine how two options relate to each other in terms of conventional comparative relations. This book features new research on incommensurability from philosophers who have shaped the field into what it is today, including John Broome, Ruth Chang and Wlodek Rabinowicz. The book covers four aspects relating to incommensurability. In the first part, the contributors synthesize research on the competing views of how to best explain incommensurability. Part II illustrates how incommensurability can help us deal (...)
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  9. Measuring needs for priority setting in healthcare planning and policy.Anders Herlitz & David Horan - 2016 - Social Science and Medicine 157:96-102.
    Much research aimed at developing measures for normative criteria to guide the assessment of healthcare resource allocation decisions has focused on health maximization, equity concerns and more recently approaches based on health capabilities. However, a widely embraced idea is that health resources should be allocated to meet health needs. Little attention has been given to the principle of need which is often mentioned as an alternative independent criteria that could be used to guide healthcare evaluations. This paper develops a model (...)
     
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  10.  31
    The limited impact of indeterminacy for healthcare rationing: how indeterminacy problems show the need for a hybrid theory, but nothing more.Anders Herlitz - 2016 - Journal of Medical Ethics 42 (1):22-25.
    A notorious debate in the ethics of healthcare rationing concerns whether to address rationing decisions with substantial principles or with a procedural approach. One major argument in favour of procedural approaches is that substantial principles are indeterminate so that we can reasonably disagree about how to apply them. To deal with indeterminacy, we need a just decision process. In this paper I argue that it is a mistake to abandon substantial principles just because they are indeterminate. It is true that (...)
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  11.  20
    Social Choice, Nondeterminacy, and Public Reasoning.Anders Herlitz & Karim Sadek - 2021 - Res Philosophica 98 (3):377-401.
    This article presents an approach to how to make reasonable social choices when independent criteria (e.g., prioritarianism, religious freedom) fail to fully determine what to do. The article outlines different explanations of why independent criteria sometimes fail to fully determine what to do and illustrates how they can still be used to eliminate ineligible alternatives, but it is argued that the independent criteria cannot ground a reasonable social choice in these situations. To complement independent criteria when they fail to fully (...)
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  12.  37
    Non-transitive Better than Relations and Rational Choice.Anders Herlitz - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (1):179-189.
    This paper argues that decision problems and money-pump arguments should not be a deciding factor against accepting non-transitive better than relations. If the reasons to accept normative standpoints that entail a non-transitive better than relation are compelling enough, we ought to revise our decision method rather than the normative standpoints. The paper introduces the most common argument in favor of non-transitive better than relations. It then illustrates that there are different ways to reconceptualize rational choice so that rational choice is (...)
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  13.  19
    Toward a Hybrid Theory of How to Allocate Health-related Resources.Anders Herlitz - 2023 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 48 (4):373-383.
    How should scarce health-related resources be allocated? This paper argues that values that apply to these decisions fail to always fully determine what we should do. Health maximization and allocation-according-to-need are suggested as two values that should be part of a general theory of how to allocate health-related resources. The “small improvement argument” is used to argue that it is implausible that one alternative is always better, worse, or equal to another alternative with respect to these values. Approaches that rely (...)
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  14.  61
    A More Plausible Collapsing Principle.Henrik Andersson & Anders Herlitz - 2018 - Theoria 84 (4):325-336.
    In 1997 John Broome presented the Collapsing Argument that was meant to establish that non-conventional comparative relations cannot exist. Broome's argument has faced a lot of scrutiny and a certain type of counterexample has been used to undermine it. Most of the counterexamples focus on the Collapsing Principle which plays a central role in Broome's argument. In this article we will take a closer look at the most common type of counterexample and propose how to adjust the Collapsing Principle in (...)
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  15.  36
    Input and output in distributive theory.Nir Eyal & Anders Herlitz - 2023 - Noûs 57 (1):3-25.
    Distributive theories evaluate distributions of goods based on candidate recipients’ characteristics, e.g. how well off candidates are, how deserving they are, and whether they fare below sufficiency. But such characteristics vary across possible worlds, so distributive theories may differ in terms of the world which for them settles candidates’ characteristics. This paper examines how distributive theories differ in terms of whether candidate recipients’ relevant characteristics are grounded in the possible world that would take place if the distributor does not intervene (...)
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  16.  12
    Committing to Priorities: Incompleteness in Macro-Level Health Care Allocation and Its Implications.Anders Herlitz - 2018 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 43 (6):724-745.
    This article argues that values that apply to health care allocation entail the possibility of “spectrum arguments,” and that it is plausible that they often fail to determine a best alternative. In order to deal with this problem, a two-step process is suggested. First, we should identify the Strongly Uncovered Set that excludes all alternatives that are worse than some alternatives and not better in any relevant dimension from the set of eligible alternatives. Because the remaining set of alternatives often (...)
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  17.  46
    Prioritarianism, Timeslices, and Prudential Value.Vuko Andrić & Anders Herlitz - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (3):595-604.
    This paper shows that versions of prioritarianism that focus at least partially on well-being levels at certain times conflict with conventional views of prudential value and prudential rationality. So-called timeslice prioritarianism, and pluralist views that ascribe importance to timeslices, hold that a benefit matters more, the worse off the beneficiary is at the time of receiving it. We show that views that evaluate outcomes in accordance with this idea entail that an agent who delays gratification makes an outcome worse, even (...)
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  18.  44
    Spectrum Arguments, Parity and Persistency.Anders Herlitz - 2020 - Theoria 86 (4):463-481.
    This article shows that introducing the positive comparative relation parity only helps one block so‐called “Spectrum Arguments” in order to avoid their unsavoury implications if one specifies parity in a specific way with respect to its persistence. The article illustrates how parity must both admit of persistency and be weakly non‐persistent for parity to block Spectrum Arguments, and identifies some consequences of that discovery for the general debate on Spectrum Arguments, value theory and comparability problems.
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  19.  18
    Microlevel Prioritizations and Incommensurability.Anders Herlitz - 2018 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 27 (1):75-86.
    This article addresses the prioritization questions that arise when people attempt to institutionalize reasonable ethical principles and create guidelines for microlevel decisions. I propose that this instantiates an incommensurability problem, and suggest two different kinds of practical solutions for dealing with this issue.
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  20.  16
    Cost-Effectiveness, Incompleteness, and Discrimination.Anders Herlitz - 2023 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 32 (2):163-173.
    This paper argues that cost-effectiveness analysis in the healthcare sector introduces a discrimination risk that has thus far been underappreciated and outlines some approaches one can take toward this. It is argued that appropriate standards used in cost-effectiveness analysis in the healthcare sector fail to always fully determine an optimal option, which entails that cost-effectiveness analysis often leaves decision makers with large sets of permissible options. Larger sets of permissible options increase the role of decision makers’ biases, whims, and prejudices, (...)
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  21. A Model and Indicator of Aggregate Need Satisfaction for Capped Objectives and Weighting Schemes for Situations of Scarcity.Anders Herlitz - 2017 - Social Indicators Research 133 (2):413-430.
    Abstract Normative criteria for evaluations of economic and social outcomes are often formulated in terms of social welfare functions which are essentially and importantly non-satiable. However, there are good reasons to consider certain normative criteria and many policy objectives to be capped, i.e. bounded, and thus satiable provided sufficient resources are made available for their satisfaction. Inspired by the Foster–Greer–Thorbecke class of indicators, this paper uses an interdisciplinary approach to develop a model for assessing outcomes in terms of capped objectives (...)
     
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  22. The Counseling, Self-Care, Adherence Approach to Person-Centered Care and Shared Decision Making: Moral Psychology, Executive Autonomy, and Ethics in Multi-Dimensional Care Decisions.Anders Herlitz, Christian Munthe, Marianne Törner & Gun Forsander - 2016 - Health Communication 31 (8):964-973.
    This article argues that standard models of person-centred care (PCC) and shared decision making (SDM) rely on simplistic, often unrealistic assumptions of patient capacities that entail that PCC/SDM might have detrimental effects in many applications. We suggest a complementary PCC/SDM approach to ensure that patients are able to execute rational decisions taken jointly with care professionals when performing self-care. Illustrated by concrete examples from a study of adolescent diabetes care, we suggest a combination of moral and psychological considerations to support (...)
     
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  23.  37
    Putting costs and benefits of ordeals together.Anders Herlitz - 2021 - Economics and Philosophy 37 (1):37-49.
    This paper addresses how to think about the permissibility of introducing deadweight costs on candidate recipients of goods in order to attain better outcomes. The paper introduces some distinctions between different kinds of value dimensions that should be taken into account when such judgements are made and draws from the literature on comparisons across different value dimensions in order to canvas what sort of situations one might arguably face when evaluating ordeals. In light of the distinctions drawn and the possibilities (...)
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  24.  33
    Health, priority to the worse off, and time.Anders Herlitz - 2018 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 21 (4):517-527.
    It is a common view that benefits to the worse off should be given priority when health benefits are distributed. This paper addresses how to understand who is worse off in this context when individuals are differently well off at different times. The paper argues that the view that this judgment about who is worse off should be based solely on how well off individuals are when their complete lives are considered (i.e. 'the complete lives view') is implausible in this (...)
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  25.  9
    Comparativism and the Grounds for Person-Centered Care and Shared Decision Making.Anders Herlitz - 2017 - Journal of Clinical Ethics 28 (4):269-278.
    This article provides a new argument and a new value-theoretical ground for person-centered care and shared decision making that ascribes to it the role of enabling rational choice in situations involving clinical choice. Rather than referring to good health outcomes and/or ethical grounds such as patient autonomy, it argues that a plausible justification and ground for person-centered care and shared decision making is preservation of rationality in the face of comparative non-determinacy in clinical settings. Often, no alternative treatment will be (...)
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  26.  34
    Income-based equity weights in healthcare planning and policy.Anders Herlitz - 2017 - Journal of Medical Ethics 43 (8):510-514.
    Recent research indicates that there is a gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor. This raises the question: should we on egalitarian grounds use income-based equity weights when we assess benefits of alternative benevolent interventions, so that health benefits to the poor count for more? This article provides three egalitarian arguments for using income-based equity weights under certain circumstances. If income inequality correlates with inequality in health, we have reason to use income-based equity weights on the ground (...)
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  27.  25
    Correction to: Non-transitive Better than Relations and Rational Choice.Anders Herlitz - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (1):431-431.
    There is a mistake in the definition of the covering criterion on page 6.
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  28.  16
    Stable and unstable choices.Anders Herlitz - 2020 - Economics and Philosophy 36 (1):113-125.
    This paper introduces a condition for rational choice that states that accepting decision methods and normative theories that sometimes entail that the act of choosing a maximal alternative renders this alternative non-maximal is irrational. The paper illustrates how certain distributive theories that ascribe importance to what the status quo is violate this condition and argues that they thereby should be rejected.
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  29.  44
    Distributing global health resources: Contemporary issues in political philosophy.Nicole Hassoun & Anders Herlitz - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (11):e12632.
    How should states and international organizations allocate global health resources? This paper examines proposals for distributing these resources in the literature. First, we look at the literature on the metrics for measuring what matters and consider how they might be modified to avoid some common objections—e.g., that these measures discriminate against the disabled or fail to give due weight to helping the young (or old) or those in present (or future) generations. Second, we canvas existing approaches to evaluating allocations of (...)
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  30.  11
    Incommensurability and healthcare priority setting.Anders Herlitz - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-19.
    This paper argues that accepting incommensurability can be a useful step for developing attractive hybrid theories to how to distribute scarce health-related resources. If one provides opportunity for distributive options to be incommensurable with respect to substantive criteria, one can hold on to substantive criteria while also providing room for decision processes to play a significant role. The paper also argues that the strategy of accepting incommensurability is preferable to the strategy of having substantive criteria establish sets of options that (...)
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  31.  18
    Global health impact, priority and time.Anders Herlitz - 2024 - Developing World Bioethics 24 (1):15-20.
    This paper addresses normative issues that arise in relation to indicators and measures of health impact. With inspiration from Nicole Hassoun's recent proposal, the paper argues and illustrates that those interested in measuring global health impact face questions about how to prioritize among those with ill-health, how to weigh benefits to those who cannot lead minimally good lives against benefits to the better off, and how to think about whether someone is badly off.
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  32.  27
    Global Health Impact.Anders Herlitz - 2022 - Public Health Ethics 15 (2):117-118.
    Why should we care about global health? What obligations do we have to improve global health? How can we work towards establishing a health industry that is better equipped to deal with the most significant global health challenges? In her impressive and ambitious book, Global Health Impact: Extending Access to Essential Medicine (Hassoun, 2020), Nicole Hassoun attempts to answer these questions, by drawing on contemporary research in political philosophy, global justice, health economics and business ethics. In this symposium, Timothy Campbell, (...)
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  33.  11
    Setting Health-Care Priorities: What Ethical Theories Tell Us, Torbjörn Tännsjö. Oxford University Press, 2019, xii + 212 pages. [REVIEW]Anders Herlitz - 2020 - Economics and Philosophy 36 (3):460-465.