Distributive justice and patient selection
type: CreativeWork
description: There are not always enough medical resources to go around and pluralist theories of decision making generally do not explain the principle of justice in a way that provides action-guidance. I adopt a modified and expanded form of the claims-based approach of Rescher and Broome as the framework for a substantive and action-guiding theory of distributive justice. The resulting theory is that limited resources should be distributed according to the strength of a person's entitlement to a resource. In order to determine a person's entitlement, one must determine what context-relevant rights the person has and the strength of his or her claim to the resource, which is determined by a weighing up of context-relevant considerations, which are facts about a person's condition or situation within a certain context that ceteris paribus generate some kind of duty that they be given (or denied, depending on the consideration) the resource. Since both of these are context dependent, I discuss patients' entitlements in terms of limited medical resources.
abstract: There are not always enough medical resources to go around and pluralist theories of decision making generally do not explain the principle of justice in a way that provides action-guidance. I adopt a modified and expanded form of the claims-based approach of Rescher and Broome as the framework for a substantive and action-guiding theory of distributive justice. The resulting theory is that limited resources should be distributed according to the strength of a person's entitlement to a resource. In order to determine a person's entitlement, one must determine what context-relevant rights the person has and the strength of his or her claim to the resource, which is determined by a weighing up of context-relevant considerations, which are facts about a person's condition or situation within a certain context that ceteris paribus generate some kind of duty that they be given (or denied, depending on the consideration) the resource. Since both of these are context dependent, I discuss patients' entitlements in terms of limited medical resources.
author: Yarrison, Rebecca Bartley
language: eng
keywords: Philosophy
date published: 2009
date modified: 2026-07-24T04:10:26Z
provider: Rice University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Rice University

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/1911/61881