Due to copyright issues, an electronic copy of the thesis must be ordered from the faculty. For the faculty to have time to process the order, the order must be received by the faculty at the latest 2 days before the public defence. Orders received later than 2 days before the defence will not be processed. After the public defence, please address any inquiries regarding the thesis to the candidate.
Trial Lecture – time and place
See Trial Lecture.
Adjudication committee
- First opponent: Professor Daniel Murray Hausman, Rutgers University, United States
- Second opponent: Professor emeritus Torbjørn Tännsjö, Stockholm University, Sweden
- Third member and chair of the evaluation committee: Associate professor Henrik Vogt, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo
Chair of the Defence
Professor emeritus Ole Trond Berg, University of Oslo
Principal Supervisor
Senior researcher Mathias Barra, Akershus University Hospital
Summary
When allocating scarce medical resources, we strive to do the best we can with the available resources. However, while we aspire to provide as “much health” as possible, we also care about who the beneficiaries are. Severity criteria are operative in Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, and the UK. These criteria, while differing in interesting ways, all dictate that we should be willing to accept a higher cost of helping those who are severely ill. But what does it mean to be severely ill? Severity is a thick and heterogeneous concept. It is, at least partly, a measure of health-related worse off-ness. Severity also seems to have a prescriptive aspect: we believe that we should do something when an illness is severe. In this dissertation, I attempt to answer two questions that should be provided by a theory of illness severity: (1) what is the relevance of subjective and objective factors of wellbeing to illness severity (paper 2), and (2) to what extent is severity an aggregative concept (paper 1). I argue for a fully aggregative objective list-theory of illness severity, informed by theoretical arguments and popular views. I also examine to when we should include popular views in normative theoretical work (paper 3). I argue that popular views should be entered into reflective equilibrium processes if, and only if, they approximate considered judgments. They are more likely to approximate this standard if they are deliberated or on familiar topics. I then argue that we can make progress even when we do not have ideal studies on popular views (paper 4). We can bolster popular views by linking them with theoretical proposals that echo similar underlying intuitions.
The dissertation builds on and extends arguments from the four included papers, making the case for a fully aggregative objective theory of illness severity informed by popular views. In such a theory, some features of illness are subject-independent, while others are subject dependent.
Additional information
Contact the research support staff.