Premature Death as a Normative Concept

Abstract

The practical goal of preventing premature death seems uncontroversial. But the term 'premature death' is vague with several, sometimes conflicting definitions. This ambiguity results in several conceptions with which not all will agree. Moreover, the normative rationale behind the goal of preventing premature deaths is masked by the operational definition of existing measures. In this article, we argue that 'premature death' should be recognized as a normative concept. We propose that normative theories should be used to justify measures of premature death to provide them with normative validity and public legitimacy.

Keywords: Death; Epidemiology; Ethics; Philosophy; Public policy.

Fig. 1

The figure illustrates the two directions along which one develops the ABT into more 'sophisticated' PM-measures. These modifications fall into either or both of two broad categories: (1) mitigating critiques about the implausibility of dichotomizing thresholds—making prematureness a graded concept instead—and, (2) about the arbitrariness of the point that separates premature deaths from non-premature ones—attempting to give a better justification of the cut-off value

Fig. 2

Illustration of the connection between the elements in our framework: Premature death measures are comprised in categories of such measures. The categories can be justified by normative background theories, which are inspired by normative theories applied to the particular setting of measuring premature death. The figure is drawn and adapted from Anna Alexandrova's work on welfare measurement [, p. XL]