The social value of health research and the worst off

Bioethics

Volumn 31, Issue 2, 2017, Pages 105-115

  Barsdorf, Nicola ^a   Millum, Joseph ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF STELLENBOSCH   (South Africa)

^b NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH   (United States)

Author keywords

Global health; Health research; Priority setting; Social value; Worst off

Indexed keywords

HUMAN; PROFESSIONAL STANDARD; RESEARCH; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY;

ETHICS COMMITTEES, RESEARCH; HUMANS; RESEARCH; SOCIAL VALUES;

EID: 85009113854     PISSN: 02699702     EISSN: 14678519     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/bioe.12320     Document Type: Note

References (72)

1. Global health research refers to health research worldwide.
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12. A. Wertheimer. op. cit. note 5. In 2007 research and development investments by PharmaceuticalResearch and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) member companies totalled US44.5 billion. Eighty percent of this (US35.4 billion) was invested in domestic research and development. US9.1 billion (20%) of investments were spent abroad. See: M. Burke & S. Matlin (eds). 2008. Monitoring Financial Flows for Health Research 2008: Prioritizing research for health equity. Geneva, Switzerland: Global Forum for Health Research. Available at: http://announcementsfiles.cohred.org/gfhr_pub/assoc/s14888e/s14888e.pdf [Accessed: 20 Mar 2016];While public and philanthropic research funders all strive to improve the health of the global population, it is worth qualifying that the proportional commitment to funding non-national global research priorities varies substantially by funder. In general, bilateral aid agencies and the Gates Foundation direct the majority of their research funding to health needs in LMICs. The Wellcome Trust and NIH allocate a smaller minority of their research funding to global research; the majority focuses on national research priorities.
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14. As we discussed in Section 2, some authors (including ourselves) believe that it can be important whether social value is local. We think this is orthogonal to our point in the present paper, but we do not mean our argument to imply that research can be justified just in virtue of it having a sufficient amount of social value.
15. That does not make it ethically permissible or required, all things considered, to provide someone a benefit. For example, someone else might have a prior claim to the resource that would make it all things considered wrongful to provide the resource to the original beneficiary.
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19. All else may not be equal, since there may be cases in which much more benefit can be provided to a group that is badly off, but not the very worst off.We consider this possibility in Section 6 when we respond to objections.
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71. Our account is also general in that it can be applied by peoplewho differ with regard to the benefits that they think should count when assessing social value or who disagree with us about the correct conception of disadvantage: they can still assess social value as a function of expected benefit and the degree of disadvantage of the beneficiaries, using their preferred currency for benefits and their preferred conception of disadvantage.
72. D. Sharp & J. Millum. op. cit. note 15.