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ageism

Current Lockdown Is Ageist (Against The Young)

Written by Alberto Giubilini

Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities

University of Oxford

 

Former UK supreme court justice and historian Lord Jonathan Sumption recently made the following claim:

“I don’t accept that all lives are of equal value. My children’s and my grandchildren’s life is worth much more than mine because they’ve got a lot more of it ahead. The whole concept of quality life years ahead is absolutely fundamental if one’s going to look at the value of these things.”

This wasn’t very well received, to say the least. Experts were quickly recruited by the press to rebut his claims. Headlines were made to convey people’s outrage at the idea that we can put a value on human life, and what is worse, different values on different human lives (which, by the way, is precisely what the NHS regularly does whenever it decides whom to put on a ventilator when there are not enough ventilators for everyone, or when it decides not provide life-saving treatments that cost more than £ 30k per quality-adjusted-life-year).Read More »Current Lockdown Is Ageist (Against The Young)