Abstract
Poverty is a serious threat for human beings and their well-being. People are simply unable to live a good life when they are faced with severe problems, e.g., bad education, poor housing, poor sanitation, poor hygiene, or malnourishment. However, one of the most urgent problems with regard to poverty is bad access to primary health care and the allocation of health care resources for millions of people around the world. These people are deprived of human flourishing, and life is for them, in general, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In this chapter, I present an ethical argument that shows that people have a moral right to primary health care, and that wealthy developed countries are morally obligated to help the needy. Primary health care, and hence access to it is, as I will argue, a global public good that is protected by human dignity and the human right of protection from unwarranted bodily harm.
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Notes
- 1.
“[I]t is abundantly clear that a large proportion of the world’s population does not have access to anything approaching an adequate level and standard of health care provision, and is denied treatments and medical care that are of undoubted efficacy” (Leon and Walt 2004, 7).
- 2.
This holds, normally, for moral evaluations from outside the community, but it is also possible, of course, that within a given community disagreement may occur when beliefs about moral issues are relative to different individuals or different groups, that is when (the body of) beliefs are not only due to different communities.
- 3.
Macklin states with much plausibility: “If human rights is a meaningful concept, and if there are any human rights, then normative ethical relativism must be false. Human rights are, by definition, rights that belong to all people, wherever they may dwell and whatever may be the political system or the cultural traditions of their country or region of the world” (Macklin 1999, 243).
- 4.
Of course, some people might object, “Why should one be moral?” (or Why should one help other people?), but I strongly think that those people—one may call them moral relativists— should not be regarded for a sound ethical discourse. Aristotle—unlike Plato (1903; Politeia II)—rightly says in his ethical main writing, Nicomachean Ethics (EN I), that his teachings are for those people who already care for the ethical life. My article is not about to convince extreme moral relativists who are unwilling to engage in this line of thinking, it is about to promote the ethical reasoning of people who are already serious about ethics and the central question of living a good life.
- 5.
Nondivisibility (i.e., nonrivalry in consumption) refers to the ability of all people to benefit from the public good once it is produced. Nonexcludability refers to the inability to exclude any individual or group from the benefits of the public good once it is produced.
- 6.
In this article, I am not able to give a justification for the existence of human rights, since this would be far outside the focus of this chapter. Here, I take the existence of human rights and their sound justification—for the sake of argument—for granted. Though, of course, I have to admit that the justification of human rights is a very difficult task to deal with.
- 7.
In Injuries, Inequalities, and Health: From Policy Vacuum to Policy Action, Anthony Zwi gives two reasons why he thinks that there is a limited response to injuries in so many settings with regard to international policy. His reasons also hold for the phenomenon of the lack of interest, he maintains: “One important reason is that the poor suffer most, but also have least influence over policy decisions. As a result, there is limited public concern: it affects ‘them, not us,’ and therefore does not attract attention. Furthermore, the poor in most settings have limited political influence and may have more difficulty engaging local policy-makers with their concerns” (Zwi 2004, 274).
- 8.
It may seem that I do not need the human rights argument to back up my main thesis, since the argument of global public goods seems to be sufficient for a sound justification. So, why am I presenting two independent arguments? It is my contention that both are parts of one major sophisticated argument, and thus cannot not be reduced to one argument alone. One needs the strengths of both parts in order to present a powerful argument, so as to justify that all people should be provided with adequate access to primary health care, and to reduce their poverty.
- 9.
This thought—mediated by John Wise—also had a strong influence on the conception of the American Declaration on Independence (1776) according to the idea of equality.
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Gordon, JS. (2023). Poverty, Human Rights, and just Distribution. In: Boylan, M. (eds) International Public Health Policy and Ethics. The International Library of Bioethics, vol 106. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39973-2_9
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