Campbell, Tim | 2025
Institute for Futures Studies. Working paper 2025:2
The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBDS) is an international and interdisciplinary effort to quantify health losses from a wide array of diseases and disabilities (Murray and Lopez 2013). These losses are expressed in units of disability-adjusted life-years (DALYS). The DALY is potentially useful for quantifying health loss because it integrates mortality and morbidity into a single metric.[...]
This paper focuses on a set of problems for using DALYs-averted as a measure of effectiveness for health interventions. These problems come from population ethics, the part of ethics that is concerned with formulating an adequate theory of the goodness, or choiceworthiness, of populations in which “the number of people, their welfare, and their identities may vary” (Arrhenius and Campbell 2018, 54).
