Considering cost-effectiveness: the moral perspective

Achieving good value with scarce resources is a substantial moral issue for global health. This claim may be surprising to some, since conversations on the ethics of global health often focus on moral concerns about justice, fairness, and freedom. But outcomes and consequences are also of central moral importance in setting priorities. In this chapter we explore the moral relevance of cost-effectiveness, a major tool for capturing the relationship between resources and outcomes, by illustrating what is lost in moral terms for global health when cost-effectiveness is ignored.