Ethical Challenges in Using DALYs to Inform Health Interventions: Some Lessons from Population Ethics

Institute for Futures Studies. Working paper 2025:2

From the introduction

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).