title: Principles of protection: a formal approach for evaluating dose distributions.
abstract: One of the central issues in radiation protection consists in determining what weight should be given to individual doses in relation to collective or aggregated doses. A mathematical framework is introduced in which such assessments can be made precisely in terms of comparisons between alternative distributions of individual doses. In addition to evaluation principles that are well known from radiation protection, a series of principles that are derived from parallel discussions in moral philosophy and welfare economics is investigated. A battery of formal properties is then used to investigate the evaluative principles. The results indicate that one of the new principles, bilinear prioritarianism, may be preferable to current practices, since it satisfies efficiency-related properties better without sacrificing other desirable properties.
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy and the History of Technology, Royal Institute of Technology, Teknikringen 78B, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden. perwi@infra.kth.se
authors.forename: Per
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Wikman-Svahn
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Peterson
authors.forename: Sven Ove
authors.initials: SO
authors.lastname: Hansson
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011829:Radiation Dosage; D011835:Radiation Protection; D018570:Risk Assessment