Extending and ending life in health care and beyond

My dissertation explores problems in morality of saving and the morality of killing. I first argue that the veil of ignorance offers no clear advantage over other distributive methods or theories on how to allocate scarce resources. Even if definite results can be derived from behind a veil of ignorance, these results do not in themselves have any important moral standing. The veil cannot tell us what features are morally relevant to a given distributive problem, and there is a sense in which choice behind a veil of ignorance fails to take persons seriously.;I go on to explore what Prioritarianism implies for the allocation of scarce health care resources. Prioritarianism, I argue, provides a simpler, more plausible justification than many other accounts of why the younger vis-a-vis the older should receive some priority in the allocation of lifesaving treatment. I discuss how one version of Prioritarianism may contravene certain accounts of disability discrimination in health care, while another version of Prioritarianism can satisfy these accounts only at the cost of restricting the scope of priority to the worse off.;I consider the morality of saving further in connection with the morality of killing. I argue that a person's age is a morally relevant consideration when killing one person would save others. Not only is this result compatible with a plausible account of wrongful killing, it is suggested by several solutions to the Trolley Problem and by a plausible way of thinking about constraints against harming in general.;Finally, I discuss the morality of killing when killing would be for the sake of the one who is to die, as in voluntary euthanasia. Kant and some contemporary Kantians have argued such actions are irrational and morally wrong because they involve a practical contradiction in an agent's treatment of rational nature. I argue that the Kantian view is mistaken and defend an alternative account of the wrongness of killing others that is compatible with the moral permissibility of voluntary euthanasia.