Distributive justice and patient selection
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.
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