What is a “tragic choice”? In this course we will discuss the dilemmas surrounding the decisions by societies to distribute various goods and bads in different ways. Among these allocations are: who gets expensive medical care and transplants; what protocols are put in place to stem a pandemic; who gets drafted; who is given the right to have children; priorities for immigration; the administration of the death penalty; distributing food in a famine or water in a drought; the ransom of hostages. In every society, citizens hold competing and incommensurable values. Tragic choices highlight---and sometime hide or suppress—the conflicts that such choices pit among these values.
The principal text is Tragic Choices: the conflicts society confronts in the allocation of tragically scarce resources by Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt (Norton, 1978).
Bobbitt, Philip C.