Posted: Nov 13, 2014 3:21 pm
Sendraks wrote:As I've already posted, variability in healthy years of life is strongly linked to deprivation. The greater the deprivation the greater the number of years in poor health.
However, how this effects the sexes varies with deprivation. The greater the deprivation, the more years of ill health women experience than men. At the lowest levels of deprivation, the number of years of ill health is almost equal but with a slight advantage to women.
We can either talk about life expectancy (which TMB doesn't like), or quality of life which TMB has so far ignored.
I think this is reasonable and more productive than this endless deliberation over the exact word "suffering", which wasn't really central to the conversation and has been rather overburdened.
I don't think we can completely dismiss the views of people in ill health or otherwise as to whether their life is preferable to death (overall net positive) or less preferable to death (overall net negative) in such a conversation though. If people regard more years, even in poor health as positive, who are we to tell them otherwise?
That is not to say we wouldn't all prefer good health to poor health, it merely acknowledges that this isn't a choice we all have.