The implications of equal value of life and prioritarianism for the evaluation of population health

We analyze the implications of several principles related to the concepts of equal, or prioritarian, entitlement to continued life. These principles, when modeled as axioms for the evaluation of health distributions, and combined with some basic structural axioms, provide several characterization results of population health evaluation functions. Our analysis implies that the scope of the concepts of equal and prioritarian entitlement to continued life needs to be limited, in order to allow for morbidity (and not just mortality) concerns in the evaluation of population health.