Attila Tanyi

The aim of the project is to develop a new framework for the investigation of allocation issues in healthcare. Any agent who makes a claim on health-care resources must provide reasons that support their claim. I propose that distributive justice in health-care resource allocation is therefore best seen as an attempt to maximize reason-based claims of agents on healthcare resources. But ought we to make such priority-setting – often called ‘rationing’ – decisions? I propose that the answer to this query also depends on our account of the relevant reasons. In short, the most promising way to approach this area of applied ethics is to focus on the reasons that are relevant to our inquiry. This is a promising way also because in recent years there has been an upsurge in research on reasons. At the same time, this discussion has not made its way into medical ethics. This project aims to fill this gap by fusing the fields of applied, normative and metaethics.