Abstract

Nicole Hassoun’s book Global Health Impact: Extending Access to Essential Medicines has three parts. Part 1 is about the right to health, Part 2 offers a concrete proposal for how to promote the ability of people in the developing world to live minimally good lives and Part 3 is concerned with consumer responsibility as it relates to global health. I argue that there is a philosophical tension between the respective projects of Parts 1 and 2. The project of Part 1 reflects a sufficientarian ideal, namely ensuring that each person in our global community has the ability to live a minimally good life. But, the concrete proposal offered in Part 2 reflects a different ideal, namely maximizing global health benefit. While these two ideals may often converge on a set of feasible health outcomes that we should aim to bring about, they can also diverge. The extent to which they diverge depends on our specification of the minimally good life. It is therefore crucial that we have a criterion for distinguishing lives that are at least minimally good from those that are not. Unfortunately, Hassoun’s proposed criterion is problematic in that no life satisfies it.