Children's Rights and Children's Health

Abstract

After decades of philosophical discussion, there is no federally guaranteed right to health care in the United States, nor any consensus that all citizens should have this right. It is the aim of this article to clear the philosophical path for a legal argument that at least children should have this right. First, I suggest that the moral rationale for a legal entitlement to education can reasonably and should be extended to health care. Second, I argue that a child’s right to health care is philosophically well grounded in all major theories of justice, even within right libertarianism, the political theory most hostile to welfare rights in general. My strategy is to offer an immanent critique of two prominent right libertarian accounts of what is owed to children by parents and society in general. After showing the internal inconsistencies in the accounts of Jan Narveson and Tristram Engelhardt, and analyzing in particular the latter’s right libertarian treatment of putative rights to health care, I show that no significant philosophical argument remains against the rights claims of children to a decent minimum of health care in affluent societies. In this way, I seek to clear the path for philosophers and lawyers to offer a broader philosophical and legal grounding for children’s rights to health care. Finally, I defend the notion that a rights-based approach to children’s welfare is indeed justified against the arguments of Daniel Callahan and Onora O’Neill.