ABSTRACT
Medical advances, the costs of high technology care, the number of people living longer. The values of sight and hearing, along with the other valued states of affairs associated with health, are incommensurable. The health service is apparently different because it is sometimes expressly concerned with life saving, and it seems odd to say that life protection is a side constraint of health policy as it is for transport policy. But it is worth pursuing the parallel. A system that devotes all its resources to saving those lives immediately at risk is not necessarily the system that saves the most lives. On the strength of the argument various economists have built a supposedly neutral model for informing resource allocation decisions; a new arithmetic of happiness or ‘felicific calculus’ which enables us to spend the health care budget in a way that maximises welfare. The chapter considers an important objection to any attempt to fix the parameters of resource allocation.
