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Incommensurability and Population-Level Bioethics

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Whereas value incommensurability has received significant attention over the last couple of decades, its importance and implications in applied ethics are largely understudied. This special issue aims to help fill this gap by looking at the role of incommensurability in population-level bioethics. For our purposes, incommensurability obtains when none of the conventional comparative value relations hold between two “items”, i.e., it is not true that A is determinately better, worse or equally as good as B. An “item” might be anything that has some kind of value. In population-level bioethics, it can be anything ranging from a personal disease state to a distribution of health-related resources to a pandemic response. Typically, incommensurability is alleged when several different values are at stake and items are good in very different ways, e.g., one choice mitigates significant health inequalities while another maximizes health without mitigating health inequalities. This special issue investigates the problems that incommensurability, roughly so construed, poses in population-level bioethics as well as the extent to which accepting incommensurability may help us resolve long-standing challenges in the area. For example, might incommensurability characterize the relation between different health states, say, between certain disabilities and their absence? Might it help characterize the relation between nonexistence and a life just barely worth living, potentially helping us to avoid some “paradoxes” of population ethics? The contributions to the special issue grew out of a conference on incommensurability and population-level bioethics held at the Center for Population-Level Bioethics at Rutgers University in May 2022 (co-sponsored by the Climate Ethics research program at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, Sweden).

Editors

  • Nir Eyal Nir Eyal  &

    Nir Eyal

    Rutgers University, United States Nir Eyal (neyal@cplb.rutgers.edu) is the inaugural Henry Rutgers Professor of Bioethics at Rutgers University. He founded and directs Rutgers’s Center for Population-Level Bioethics, which is dedicated to the political philosophy of bioethics, with appointments at Rutgers’s School of Public Health and Department of Philosophy. Eyal works primarily on population-level bioethics and research ethics, and contributes to egalitarian and to consequentialist theory.

  • Anders Herlitz Anders Herlitz

    Anders Herlitz

    Lund University, Sweden Anders Herlitz (anders.herlitz@fil.lu.se) is Associate Professor of Practical Philosophy at Lund University and Researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS). He is (together with Henrik Andersson) the editor of Value Incommensurability: Ethics, Risk and Decision-Making (Routledge, 2022). Herlitz works primarily on decision theory, distributive theory and value theory, often in relation to topics in population-level bioethics.

Articles (10 in this collection)