"Facing this dilemma recently — who gets a ventilator or a hospital bed — Italian doctors sought ethical counsel and were told to consider an approach that draws on utilitarian principles.
In
layman’s terms, a utilitarianism approach would maximize overall health
by directing care toward those most likely to benefit the most from it.
If you had only one ventilator, it would go to someone more likely to
survive instead of someone deemed unlikely to do so. It would not go to
whichever patient was first admitted, and it would not be assigned via a
lottery system. (If there are ties within classes of people, then a
lottery — choosing at random — is what ethicists recommend.)
In a paper
in The New England Journal of Medicine published Monday, Dr. Ezekiel
Emanuel, vice provost for global initiatives and chairman of the
Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of
Pennsylvania, and colleagues offer ways to apply ethical principles to
rationing in the coronavirus pandemic. These too are utilitarian,
favoring those with the best prospects for the longest remaining life.
