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. 2021 Nov;51(6):44-50.
doi: 10.1002/hast.1277.

Health Justice and Rawls's Theory at Fifty: Will New Thinking about Health and Inequality Influence the Most Influential Account of Justice?

Johannes Kniess

Health Justice and Rawls's Theory at Fifty: Will New Thinking about Health and Inequality Influence the Most Influential Account of Justice?

Johannes Kniess. Hastings Cent Rep. 2021 Nov.

Abstract

This year marks the centenary of John Rawls's birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A Theory of Justice. The influence of Rawls's landmark book on the general fields of moral and political philosophy is undisputed and well-documented. It has also left a significant imprint on debates surrounding health policy, health care, and health inequalities. This article traces the changing ways in which Rawls's theory influenced debates about justice in health over the last five decades. Just as Rawls's ideas have shaped debates about health, however, these debates can help us critically appraise the theory and its limitations. In that spirit, the article sketches three areas where a focus on health reveals challenges to the Rawlsian framework: the issue of priority setting among competing goods, the theory's egalitarian commitments, and its focus on the distribution of goods.

Keywords: John Rawls; bioethics; ethics; health inequalities; health justice; justice; social determinants of health; theory of justice.

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References

Notes

    1. K. Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
    1. N. Daniels, Justice and Justification: Reflective Equilibrium in Theory and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
    1. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 6. A Theory of Justice was first published in 1971.
    1. J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University, 1993), 368.
    1. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 54.

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