The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting countries across the globe. Only a globally coordinated response, however, will enable the containment of the virus. Responding to a request from policy makers for ethics input for a global resource pledging event as a starting point, this paper outlines normative and procedural principles to inform a coordinated global coronavirus response. Highlighting global connections and specific vulnerabilities from the pandemic, and proposing standards for reasonable and accountable decision-making, the ambition of the paper is two-fold: to (...) raise awareness for the justice dimensions in the global response, and to argue for moving health from the periphery to the centre of philosophical debates about social and global justice. (shrink)

Research on how to understand legally recognized socio-economic rights produced many insights into the nature of rights. Legally recognized rights to health and, by extension, health care could contribute to health justice. Yet a tension remains between widespread international and transnational constitutional recognition of rights to health and health care and compelling normative conditions for rights recognition from both philosophers seeking to identify the scope and structure of the rights and policy scholars seeking to understand how to practically realize such (...) rights. This work identifies an overlooked source of these difficulties: the right to health care and other health rights are necessarily ‘complex’, consisting of multiple related, but irreducible, morally valuable components. ‘Complex rights’ do not fit the traditional structure of human rights, so legal recognition of same can appear confused from a philosophical perspective, but there is ample reason to admit complex rights into our moral ontology and doing so can help bridge the divide between global health practices and ongoing work in the philosophy of rights and public policy. Recognition of complex rights admittedly shifts the burden for justifying health rights, but it does so in a way that is instructive for general philosophical analysis of socio-economic rights. (shrink)