The place of human rights and the common good in global health policy.

Effy Vayena,John Tasioulas

doi:10.1007/s11017-016-9372-x

Effy Vayena, John Tasioulas

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-016-9372-x

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Abstract

This article offers an integrated account of two strands of global health justice: health-related human rights and health-related common goods. After sketching a general understanding of the nature of human rights, it proceeds to explain both how individual human rights are to be individuated and the content of their associated obligations specified. With respect to both issues, the human right to health is taken as the primary illustration. It is argued that (1) the individuation of the right to health is fixed by reference to the subject matter of its corresponding obligations, and not by the interests it serves, and (2) the specification of the content of that right must be properly responsive to thresholds of possibility and burden. The article concludes by insisting that human rights cannot constitute the whole of global health justice and that, in addition, other considerations—including the promotion of health-related global public goods—should also shape such policy. Moreover, the relationship between human rights and common goods should not be conceived as mutually exclusive. On the contrary, there sometimes exists an individual right to some aspect of a common good, including a right to benefit from health-related common goods such as programmes for securing herd immunity from diphtheria.

Highlights

Introducing human rightsGlobal health policy advocates have repeatedly called for a post-2015 development agenda that gives a prominent place to policy objectives couched in the language of human rights
This article offers an integrated account of two strands of global health justice: health-related human rights and health-related common goods
We offer an account of how to specify the content of the human right to health, i.e., the content of the duties regarding health care services and public health measures associated with the right

Summary

Introducing human rights

Global health policy advocates have repeatedly called for a post-2015 development agenda that gives a prominent place to policy objectives couched in the language of human rights. In an environment of accelerating globalization, with a concomitant decline of state power relative to various other global actors, the importance of not conceptually restricting human rights obligations to states is all the more pronounced Precisely this insight is at the heart of the innovative UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which seek to provide an authoritative specification of the human rights responsibilities directly applicable to corporations [12]. The overall health budget remained fixed, but the better-off engaged in litigation against the government to siphon off a larger share of it for themselves, often in order to treat less serious ailments.5 To take another example, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, one of the chief architects of the Millennium Development Goals (MDSs), has ascribed the success in meeting those goals partly to the fact that states are not legally bound by them. No presumptive answer to it is already inscribed in the very nature of human rights

Individuation and inclusivity

Content specification

Justice as the common good

Findings

Conclusion