Footnotes

• Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

• Competing interests None declared.

• Patient consent for publication Not required.

• Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

• ↵Some defend this tendency. See Bloche MG. The invention of health law. Calif. L. Rev. 2003;91:247, who argues that “the anguish of identified persons” should often override “population-level health maximization.” See also Goodin, op. cit. (observing that “one explanation for why too many resources are devoted to prolonging life pointlessly for terminally ill patients is that those patients are right in front of the attending physician, whereas others on whom those resources might be better spent may often not be”)