Could age be a valid criterion for rationing? In Just health, Norman Daniels argues that under certain circumstances age rationing is prudent, and therefore a morally permissible strategy to tackle the problem of resource scarcity. Crucial to his argument is the distinction between two problem-settings of intergenerational equity: equity among age groups and equity among birth cohorts. While fa...

Just health: meeting health needs fairly is an ambitious book, in which Norman Daniels attempts to bring together in a single framework all his work on health and justice from the past 25 years. One major aim is to reconcile his earlier work on the special moral importance of healthcare with his later work on the social determinants of health. In his earlier work, Daniels argued that healthcare...

Here is a health policy riddle: despite the fact that we are not always clear as to what we are trying to achieve, even on the most basic level, we must make policy anyway. Odder still: this is as we might expect it to be, and perhaps even as it should be. After all, part of what makes health policy important is precisely the fact that it raises critical questions about our most basic human val...

Norman Daniels's new book, Just Health, brings together his decades of work on the problem of justice and health. It improves on earlier writings by discussing how we can meet health needs fairly when we cannot meet them all and by attending to the implications of the socioeconomic determinants of health. In this article I return to the core idea around which the entire theory is built: that th...

Significant health inequalities exist between the Navajo tribe and the US population as a whole and are worsening over time. I argue that while these health issues are concerning, there are also larger systemic issues (i.e., the Navajo’s historic and contemporary marginalization, the removal of traditional medicine from formal healthcare settings, etc.) that continually reproduce these health i...

This standard work on treatment needs no recommendation; it is already in the possession of most physicians, and it is only necessary to say that it has been thoroughly revised to bring it abreast of modern usage. Several new articles appear on encephalitis, kala-azar, snakebite, transfusion and other subjects. No less than a (hundred authors contribute to the book, so it is evident that each s...

This paper compares three accounts of distributive justice in health and, more specifically, healthcare. I discuss two accounts—Norman Daniels’ fair equality of opportunity for health and Shlomi Segall’s luck-prioritarian equity in health—and contrast them with a sufficientarian account based on sufficiency of capabilities. The discussion highlights some important theoretical differences and si...

In this paper, we present an argument strengthening the view of Norman Daniels, Bruce Kennedy and Ichiro Kawachi that justice is good for one’s health. We argue that the pathways through which social factors produce inequalities in sleep more strongly imply a unidirectional and non-voluntary causality than with most other public health issues. Specifically, we argue against the ‘voluntarism obj...