Hassoun argues that the poor in the world have a right to health and that the Global Health Impact Index provides consumers in well-off countries with the opportunity to ensure that more people have access to essential medicines. Because of this, these consumers would be ethically obliged to purchase Global Health Impact Index-labeled products in the face of existing global inequalities. In presenting her argument, Hassoun rejects the so-called democratic account of ethical consumption in favor of the positive change account. (...) Two versions of the democratic change account are relevant. One underscores the importance of democratic procedures and institutions, while the other stresses our fundamental moral equality. While at least one prominent institutionalist account has problems, revised versions would be less vulnerable to Hassoun’s counterexamples. Furthermore, institutionalist accounts come with the epistemological gains from democratic procedures and deliberations, which may be especially important under uncertainty. Finally, and perhaps more challenging for the Global Health Impact index project, this measure may place the burden unfairly on those who need to buy medicines. This is a pivotal insight from the non-institutionalist version of the democratic account of ethical consumption. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

We live in tragic times. Millions are sheltering in place to avoid exacerbating the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. How should we respond to such tragedies? This paper argues that the human right to health can help us do so because it inspires human rights advocates, claimants, and those with responsibility for fulfilling the right to try hard to satisfy its claims. That is, the right should, and often does, give rise to what I call_ the virtue of creative resolve_. This resolve (...) embodies a fundamental commitment to finding creative solutions to what appear to be tragic dilemmas. Contra critics, we should not reject the right even if it cannot tell us how to ration scarce health resources. Rather, the right gives us a response to apparent tragedy in motivating us to search for ways of fulfilling everyone’s basic health needs. (shrink)

One of the most prevalent rationales for public healthcare policies is a human right to healthcare. Governments are the typical duty-bearers, but they differ vastly in their capacity to help those vulnerable to serious health problems and those with severe disabilities. A right to healthcare is out of the reach of many developing economies that struggle to provide the most basic services to their citizens. If human rights to provision of such goods exist, then governments would be violating rights without (...) doing anything wrong. I argue that such variable ability to provide healthcare depends not only on financial resources, but on institutional capacity, and that the latter represents a more fundamental challenge to the existence of a human right to healthcare than previously recognized. This challenge does not imply that government has no obligations to protect and improve the health of their citizens, but that it is best to think of such obligations as generated by conventional rights, namely rights arising from local legal and social conventions, which require governments to pursue health-related moral goals such as reducing suffering, closing opportunity gaps for the disadvantaged, and preventing the spread of contagious diseases. We need not think of such moral goals in terms of human rights. (shrink)

Until now, it has mostly been assumed that the kind of health the human right to health is concerned with is clearly understood and universal. Here, I question this assumption and offer an explicitly political and pluralistic account of health that is designed to help guide international and cross-cultural interventions on behalf of health. In order to be a useful mechanism of accountability, the human right to health needs an enforceable minimum standard of health by which to judge situations and (...) to determine if a violation of rights has occurred, but due to its international nature, it also needs to admit a large degree of cultural flexibility. With the account of health that I provide, I hope to clarify what makes up that minimum standard in a way that avoids unjustified parochial bias, while not being so permissive as to undermine the political force of a universal human right. (shrink)

Research on how to understand legally recognized socio-economic rights produced many insights into the nature of rights. Legally recognized rights to health and, by extension, health care could contribute to health justice. Yet a tension remains between widespread international and transnational constitutional recognition of rights to health and health care and compelling normative conditions for rights recognition from both philosophers seeking to identify the scope and structure of the rights and policy scholars seeking to understand how to practically realize such (...) rights. This work identifies an overlooked source of these difficulties: the right to health care and other health rights are necessarily ‘complex’, consisting of multiple related, but irreducible, morally valuable components. ‘Complex rights’ do not fit the traditional structure of human rights, so legal recognition of same can appear confused from a philosophical perspective, but there is ample reason to admit complex rights into our moral ontology and doing so can help bridge the divide between global health practices and ongoing work in the philosophy of rights and public policy. Recognition of complex rights admittedly shifts the burden for justifying health rights, but it does so in a way that is instructive for general philosophical analysis of socio-economic rights. (shrink)