Descripciones mejoradas de Syndetics:

The competition for limited health care resources is intensifying. We urgently need an acceptable method for deciding how they should be allocated. But the goods that health care produces are of very different kinds. Health care can extend the lives of children and of older people. It can make it possible for a person to walk, when without health care that person would be permanently bedridden; and it can reduce the pain and distress of people who are terminally ill. How can we possibly decide which of these - and many more - diverse achievements of health care are more deserving than others? We need a common unit by which we might be able to measure these very different goods. The Quality-Adjusted Life Year, or QALY, is the most developed proposal for such a unit of measure. In this book a distinguished team of ethicists and economists defend the core of the QALY proposal: that health care resources should be used so as to produce more years of life, of the highest possible quality. This leads to a discussion of such fundamental questions as whether all lives are of equal value, whether health care should be allocated on the basis of need and whether the QALY approach incorporates an adequate account of fairness or justice. The result is the most thorough account yet of the ethical issues raised by the use of the QALY as a basis for allocating health care resources.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Introduction
• The background to the QALY
• Age discrimination
• Quality of life
• Double jeopardy
• Public opinion
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Born in Australia, Singer received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Melbourne and, in 1971, his B. Phil from University College, Oxford. During his teaching career, he has held positions in philosophy in England, the United States, and Australia. While a student at Oxford, Singer was deeply affected by a group of people who had become vegetarians for ethical reasons. Joining their commitment to the rights of animals, he wrote Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (1975), a persuasively reasoned, yet clearly understandable defense of the rights of animals. Singer's vocal concern for the proper treatment of animals has triggered a new appreciation of the anthropocentric bias of traditional Western moral philosophy; other philosophers have followed his lead. Complaining that ethical theorists have focused too intensely upon the rights, responsibilities, and treatment of humans, Singer dubs this malady "speciesism" and calls for a broader moral perspective---one that includes a sensitivity to the needs and concerns of other sentient creatures. (Bowker Author Biography)