Introduction to Symposium on Daniel Hausman’s Valuing Health: Well-Being, Freedom and Suffering

Abstract

This article introduces a symposium on Daniel Hausman’s Valuing Health: Well-Being, Suffering and Freedom (OUP, 2015). The symposium contains papers by Elselijn Kingma, Adam Oliver, Anna Alexandrova, Erik Nord, Alex Voorhoeve and James Wilson, with replies by Daniel Hausman. In Valuing Health, Hausman argues that, despite apparently measuring health, projects such as the Global Burden of Disease Study in fact measure judgments about the value of health. Once this has been clarified, the key question is how the value of health should be measured. Hausman argues that existing instruments measure the private value of health, that is, health’s ‘contribution to whatever the individual cares about or should care about’, whereas what should be measured for resource allocation purposes is the public value of health, that is, the value health should be accorded from the perspective of the liberal state. Hausman argues that the public value of health should be measured by the extent to which (i) suffering and (ii) activity limitations are relieved. Each commentator engages with a different aspect of Hausman’s argument.