Recently we argued that social justice is concerned with human well-being, which is best understood as involving plural, irreducible dimensions, each of which represents something of independent moral significance. Health is one of these distinct dimensions of well-being, as is personal security, the development and exercise of cognitive capacities for reasoning, living under conditions of social respect, developing and sustaining deep personal attachments, and being able to lead self-determining lives. In this paper, we address why considerations ...

This special issue of the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities focuses on two areas of substantial and growing importance to the human development and capability approach: disability and health. The research on disability, health and the capability approach has been diverse in the topics it covers, and the conceptual frameworks and methodologies it uses, beginning over a decade and a half ago in health (Ruger 1998) and more than a decade ago in disability (Baylies 2002).1 We are pleased to share a set of articles in these two areas. ...

Abstract Background Health-related stigma is a complex phenomenon, the experience of which intersects with those of other adversities arising from a diversity of social inequalities and oppressive identities like gender, sexuality, and poverty – a concept called “intersectionality”. Understanding this intersectionality between health-related stigma and other forms of social marginalization can provide a fuller and more comprehensive picture of stigma associated with health conditions. The main objective ...

This paper develops the idea of health justice as a plural conception. It draws on the literature on justice from philosophy and economics, and investigates its application and reach in the space of health. Several distinctions are invoked in identifying and contrasting different facets of health justice and injustice. These include active versus passive injustice; process fairness versus substantive justice; comparative versus noncomparative justice; compensatory and distributive justice. Within distributive justice, the health implications of ...

Despite large gains in health over the past few decades, the distribution of health risks worldwide remains extremely and unacceptably uneven. Although the health sector has a crucial role in addressing health inequalities, its efforts often come into conflict with powerful global actors in pursuit of other interests such as protection of national security, safeguarding of sovereignty, or economic goals. This is the starting point of The Lancet–University of Oslo Commission on Global Governance for Health. With globalisation, health inequity ...

Up until very recently, the international debate on health inequality tended to disregard the issue of specifying equity objectives precisely. This was unfortunate, given the importance of normative analysis for understanding why people care about social justice in the field of health; the extent to which specific types of inequality are compatible with equity; how the concept should be measured; and how rational policies may be formulated and monitored. This article critically appraises six well established approaches to defining equity—egality, ...