Prioritarianism in Practice

Matthew D. Adler is Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy, and Public Policy at Duke University. He is the author of Measuring Social Welfare (2019) and Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis (2012). Ole F. Norheim is Professor of Medical Ethics at University of Bergen, Norway and Adjunct Professor of Global Health at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

• 1. Introduction Matthew D. Adler and Ole F. Norheim; 2. Theory of prioritarianism Matthew D. Adler; 3. Well-being measurement Matthew D. Adler and Koen Decancq; 4. Prioritarianism and optimal taxation Matti Tuomala and Matthew Weinzierl; 5. Prioritarianism and measuring social progress Koen Decancq and Eric Schokkaert; 6. Prioritarianism and health policy Richard Cookson, Ole F. Norheim, and Ieva Skarda; 7. Prioritarianism and fatality risk regulation James K. Hammitt and Nicolas Treich; 8. Prioritarianism and climate change Maddalena Ferranna and Marc Fleurbaey; 9. Prioritarianism and education Erwin Ooghe; 10. Empirical research on ethical preferences: How popular is prioritarianism? Erik Schokkaert and Benoît Tarroux; 11. Prioritarianism and equality of opportunity Paolo Brunori, Francisco H.G. Ferreira, and Vito Peragine; 12. Prioritarianism and the covid-19 pandemic David E. Bloom, Maddalena Ferranna, and J. P. Sevilla.

'Prioritarianism is, broadly speaking, the ethical principle of decision-making in which we give extra weight to the needs of the most deprived. What makes Prioritarianism in Practice a valuable book is that it is a stocktaking of the philosophy and economics of prioritarianism and includes a series of chapters that show how these ideas can help us navigate the challenges we currently face - from health economics and policy, and climate change and interventions to combat inequality of opportunity, through the nature of education needed in this new world, to an excellent, topical chapter on Prioriarianism and the COVID-19 Pandemic. The book serves as a single source for the philosophy of prioritarianism and its real-world applications.' Kaushik Basu, Cornell University