Sridhar Venkatapuram: Health justice: an argument from the capabilities approach

Abstract

Sridhar Venkatapuram’s book, Health Justice: An Argument from the Capabilities Approach, is the latest to take a capabilities approach to the increasingly important debates in health and social justice. This work follows on the heels of Jennifer P. Ruger’s Health and Social Justice (2010) [1] and Madison Powers and Ruth Faden’s Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy (2006) [2], both of which also build on the capabilities paradigm. The focus on human capabilities has taken hold in the health policy world as well. The World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) framework for measuring health, for example, is now titled, ‘‘International Classification of Functioning, Disabilities and Handicaps’’ [3]. The term ‘‘functioning’’ replaced ‘‘impairments’’ in 2001. Venkatapuram’s book enters this space with a bold and well-articulated thesis. He proposes a conception of social justice that considers health to be its ‘‘first priority’’ (p. 72). Venkatapuram builds on the capabilities paradigm, but injects it with a new, more comprehensive understanding of health, and modifies it so as to centralize health as its overarching goal. What he defends is a ‘‘capability to be healthy’’ (CH), which he argues, ‘‘is a person’s ability to achieve or exercise a cluster of basic capabilities and functionings, and each at a level that constitutes a life worthy of equal human dignity in the modern world.’’ And building on Martha Nussbaum’s influential list of ten central human capabilities (CHCs), Venkatapuram argues that ‘‘the CH can be usefully understood as a ‘meta-capability’ to achieve or exercise ten CHCs’’ (p. 143). Such a conception of health justice, he