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...

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