The limited moral arithmetic of health and well-being

In attempting to quantify the global burden of disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) seeks to define summary measures of the health of the world’s population. This choice is not inevitable, because disease diminishes well-being and people’s capacities to achieve what they value; and one might measure the global burden of disease by measuring the impact of disease in terms of wider consequences than the impact on health. John Broome argues for such a proposal. He suggests measuring the burden of disease in terms of its consequences for well-being. In his view, the consequences for the population should be calculated by summing the total consequences for each individual person, and the life-time consequences for each individual should be determined by summing the consequences for each year with no discounting and every age counting equally.