Abstract
Programs, policies, and technologies - particularly those concerned with health equity - are often designed with justice envisioned as the end goal. These policies or interventions, however, frequently fail to recognize how the beneficiaries have historically embodied the cumulative effects of marginalization, which undermines the effectiveness of the intended justice. These well-meaning attempts at justice are bounded by greater socio-historical constraints. Bounded justice suggests that it is impossible to attend to fairness, entitlement, and equity when the basic social and physical infrastructures underlying them have been eroded by racism and other historically entrenched isms. Using the case of Brazil's National Health Policy for the Black Population, this paper proposes that bounded justice can contribute to justice discourses by serving as a concept, a proffering to a multi-disciplinary conceptual framework, and a potential analytic for those interested in the design of policy, technology, and programmatic interventions towards health equity.
Highlights
Programs, policies, and technologies — those concerned with health equity — are often designed with justice envisioned as the end goal
This paper provides the biography of the concept grounded in the case of Brazil, its relationship to other concepts in an interpretative approach to social reality[5] and a way to envision bounded justice as applied to the current moment of COVID-19 and the increased calls for equity as a solution to fix the ails of racial injustice
This by no means is a suggestion that public health practitioners, policymakers, and activists curb their efforts in fighting for equity
Summary
Policies, and technologies — those concerned with health equity — are often designed with justice envisioned as the end goal. In the context of health, some practitioners hold health equity as the guiding force. According to public health scholars Braveman and Gruskin,1 “equity means social justice or fairness; it is an ethical concept, grounded in principles of distributive justice. Equity in health can be — and has widely been — defined as the absence of socially unjust or unfair health disparities.”. As intimated by Braveman,[2] equity is linked with notions of fairness and ethical concepts of justice — distributive justice. Distributive justice denotes a just distribution of resources according to the needs of the population.
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