Publication Date
6-2020
Document Type
Article
Organizational Units
Sturm College of Law
Keywords
COVID, Ethics, Hospitals, Health care
Abstract
Proposals for allocating scarce lifesaving resources in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic have aligned in some ways and conflicted in others. This paper attempts a kind of priority setting in addressing these conflicts. In the first part, we identify points on which we do not believe that reasonable people should differ—even if they do. These are (i) the inadequacy of traditional clinical ethics to address priority-setting in a pandemic; (ii) the relevance of saving lives; (iii) the flaws of first-come, first-served allocation; (iv) the relevance of post-episode survival; (v) the difference between age and other factors that affect life-expectancy; and (vi) the need to avoid quality-of-life judgments. In the second part, we lay out some positions on which reasonable people can and do differ. These include (i) conflicts between maximizing benefits and priority to the worst off; (ii) role-based priority; and (iii) whether patients’ existing lifesaving resources should be subject to redistribution.
Copyright Date
6-2020
Publication Statement
This article is a work of the United States government. Such works are not entitled to domestic copyright protection under U.S. law and are therefore in the public domain.
This act only applies to U.S. domestic copyright as that is the extent of U.S. federal law. The U.S. government asserts that it can still hold the copyright to those works in other countries.
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File Format
application/pdf
Publication Title
Journal of Law and the Biosciences
Recommended Citation
David Wasserman, Govind Persad & Joseph Millum, Setting Priorities Fairly in Response to Covid-19: Identifying Overlapping Consensus and Reasonable Disagreement, 7 J. L. & Biosciences 1 (2020).
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