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Bergen Centre for Ethics and Priority Setting in Health (BCEPS)

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Seminar

Philosophy of Priority Setting Tuesday: A formal "bare-bones" prioritarian framework

Mathias Barra will speak on work in progress: "A formal 'bare-bones' prioritarian framework."

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I will present work on a non-axiological approach to prioritariansism, aiming at a minimal theory about the morality of prioritising the worst-off. I will argue that a minimal theory is a) sufficient to express the core prioritarian credo - that improving the lot of the worst off is more morally important than improving the lot of the better off - and that b) although this theory seem capable of representing this core credo, it has surprisingly few axiological or distributive consequences. I next explore which additional assumptions can be imposed on this theory in order to recuperate a more expressive theory that can handle e.g. the non-identity problem.