Park and Davies (2024) discuss the allocation of scarce resources during a pandemic—primarily ventilators and healthcare staff—and assess the ethical concepts that are used in arguments for and aga...

In infectious disease outbreaks, demand for certain medical resources often outstrips supply, necessitating frameworks to fairly allocate these now-scarce resources. Vaccination, meanwhile, can oft...

Vaccine-sensitive rationing falls into the problematic tendency in bioethics to present one’s research as neutral and simply surveying the field, all while (1) assuming the permanence of capitalism...

In “Rationing, Responsibility, and Vaccination during COVID-19: A Conceptual Map,” Park and Davies interestingly lay out the discussion of employing vaccination status as a rationing criterion in t...

Park and Davies (2024) have conducted impressive work on synthesizing the discussion of vaccination-sensitive rationing and relevant theoretical approaches. In this commentary, we build upon their...

Two questions emerge from the target article about reciprocity as a priority principle for health resource allocation: (1) whether we owe people priority for scarce and potentially life-saving heal...

Park and Davies (2024) address the question of whether vaccine status can be an ethically legitimate criterion for the allocation of scarce medical resources, such as access to an ICU bed and venti...

If an autonomous rational agent can freely choose whether to get vaccinated under pandemic conditions, should he or she be held responsible for deciding not to? Let the term to be held responsible...

Park and Davies have laid out an illuminating map of major arguments bearing on whether vaccination status should affect access to scarce healthcare resources during a pandemic. Notably, they sugge...

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented strain on hospitals and, in particular, critical care settings. Early in the pandemic, multiple plans were developed to ration ventilators in anticipatio...

Rationing is inevitable, especially in the context of pandemic scarcity. And, for the sake of fairness, it is important that it be based on sound ethical grounds and public health goals. In their t...

In their paper, “Rationing, Responsibility, and Vaccination during Covid-19: A Conceptual Map,” Jim Park and Ben Davies (2024) do a fine job of synthesizing the justice literature on whether, when,...

Building on the literature about the important differences between philosophical theory development and policymaking (Kamm 1990), I argue that the role and implications of counterexamples differ si...

On the question of whether vaccination status should be relevant to healthcare rationing, Park and Davies (2024) seek to “map out the moral terrain in which the arguments have proceeded” (66). In d...

Luck egalitarianism is a responsibility-sensitive theory of distributive justice. Its application to health and healthcare is controversial. This article addresses a novel critique of luck egalitarianism, namely, that it wrongfully discriminates against those responsible for their health disadvantage when allocating scarce healthcare resources. The philosophical literature about discrimination offers two primary reasons for what makes discrimination wrong (when it is): harm and disrespect. These two approaches are employed to analyze whether luck egalitarian healthcare prioritization should be considered wrongful discrimination. Regarding (...) harm, it is very plausible to consider the policies harmful but much less reasonable to consider those responsible for their health disadvantages a socially salient group. Drawing on the disrespect literature, where social salience is typically not required for something to be discrimination, the policies are a form of discrimination. They are, however, not disrespectful. The upshot of this first assessment of the discrimination objection to luck egalitarianism in health is, thus, that it fails. (shrink)