Blackwell Reference Online

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“Explicating the demands of justice in allocating public health resources and in setting priorities for public health policies, or in determining whom they should target, remains among the most daunting challenges in public health ethics” ( Childress et al., 2002 ). This will be the primary challenge taken on in this essay. Our key question is this: What does it mean to be a just and caring society so far as meeting public health care needs is concerned when we have only limited resources to meet virtually unlimited health care needs of all sorts? This is a complex question, so our first task will be to sort out this complexity. Three working assumptions lie behind our key question. First, we assume that issues of justice need to be addressed with respect to meeting public health needs, that these decisions are not simply a matter of social beneficence (freely given or withheld for any reason at all), and that these decisions also ought not be determined through the morally arbitrary use of political power. The basis for this first working assumption is that we are talking about public health needs , which, if a society fails to address them, will have morally objectionable consequences so far as protecting fair equality of opportunity is concerned. Daniels (1985) has argued that we are not morally obligated as a society to pursue “equal health for all,” an impossible ideal. ... log in or subscribe to read full text