One must allocate a finite set of indivisible goods among two agents without monetary compensation. We impose Pareto-efficiency, anonymity, a weak notion of no-envy, a welfare lower bound based on each agent’s ranking of the sets of goods, and a monotonicity property relative to changes in...

This paper re-examines a counterintuitive corollary of utilitarianism under unequal longevities: the tendency to redistribute resources from short-lived towards long-lived agents, against any intuition of compensation. It is shown that this corollary prevails not only under time-additive...

We propose two axioms that introduce lower bounds into resource monotonicity requirements for rules for the problem of adjudicating conflicting claims. Suppose the amount to divide increases. The first axiom requires that two claimants whose lower bound changes equally experience an equal change...

An early death is, undoubtedly, a serious disadvantage. However, the compensation of short-lived individuals has remained so far largely unexplored, probably because it appears infeasible. Indeed, short-lived agents can hardly be identified ex ante, and cannot be compensated ex post. We argue...

We consider a model where agents differ in their preferences about consumption labor and health, in their (health-dependent) earning ability, and in their health disposition. We study the joint taxation of income and health expenditure, under incentive-compatibility constraints, on the basis of...

We propose a methodology to evaluate social projects from an (equality of) opportunity perspective by looking at their effect on (parts of) the distribution of outcomes conditional on morally irrelevant characteristics, taken here to be parental education level and indigenous background. The...

We explore in this paper the implications of ethical and operational principles for the evaluation of population health. We formalize those principles as axioms for social preferences over distributions of health for a given population. We single out several focal population health evaluation...

This paper focuses on the optimal allocation between health and lifestyle choices when a society is concerned about both fairness and forgiveness. Based on the idea of fresh starts, we construct a social ordering that permits us to make welfare assessments when it is acceptable to compensate...

There exist congenital diseases that reduce newborns' potential opportunities. This reduction is sometimes alleviated if the congenital disease is early detected thanks to a newborn screening program. We propose an outcome measurement of newborn screening programs based on the opportunity gains...

The ethic of 'priority' is a compromise between the extremely compensatory ethic of 'welfare equality' and the needs-blind ethic of 'income equality'. We propose an axiom of priority, and characterize resource-allocation rules that are impartial, prioritarian, and solidaristic. They comprise a...