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)

How should we measure medicines’ global health impact to set targets, monitor performance and improve health around the world? Can such a metric provide a philosophically well-grounded basis for an ethical consumption campaign that will create incentives for pharmaceutical companies and other agents to expand (equitable) access to essential medicines? And if such metrics exist, how should we think about our individual obligations to support ethical consumption campaigns on this basis? This paper reflects on these questions in light of Tim (...) Campbell’s, Yukiko Asada’s, and Andreas Albertsen’s worries about the answers I provide in Global Health Impact: Extending Access on Essential Medicines. I explain how reflecting on treatments consequences for individuals’ ability to live minimally well supports the creation of the Global Health Impact (GHI) index (https://global-health-impact.org/). I also consider how the index might be modified to better support efforts to promote everyone’s human rights. Finally, I argue that individuals should often promote positive change through GHI and other ethical consumption campaigns. (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)