Human rights and global health: A research program

Metaphilosophy 36 (1‐2):182-209 (2005)
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Abstract

One-third of all human lives end in early death from poverty-related causes. Most of these premature deaths are avoidable through global institutional reforms that would eradicate extreme poverty. Many are also avoidable through global health-system reform that would make medical knowledge freely available as a global public good. The rules should be redesigned so that the development of any new drug is rewarded in proportion to its impact on the global disease burden (not through monopoly rents). This reform would bring drug prices down worldwide close to their marginal cost of production and would powerfully stimulate pharmaceutical research into currently neglected diseases concentrated among the poor. Its feasibility shows that the existing medical-patent regime (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights—TRIPS—as supplemented by bilateral agreements) is severely unjust—and its imposition a human-rights violation on account of the avoidable mortality and morbidity it foreseeably produces.

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Thomas W. Pogge
Yale University

Citations of this work

World Poverty and Human Rights.Thomas Pogge - 2002 - Ethics and International Affairs 19 (1):1-7.
Severe Poverty as a Violation of Negative Duties.Thomas Pogge - 2005 - Ethics and International Affairs 19 (1):55-83.
How to Do Research Fairly in an Unjust World.Angela J. Ballantyne - 2010 - American Journal of Bioethics 10 (6):26-35.
Global health justice.Jennifer Prah Ruger - 2009 - Public Health Ethics 2 (3):261-275.

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References found in this work

Reasons and Persons.Derek Parfit - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition.John Rawls - 1999 - Harvard University Press.
A Theory of Justice.John Rawls - 1971 - Oxford,: Harvard University Press. Edited by Steven M. Cahn.
Political Liberalism.John Rawls - 1993 - Columbia University Press.
The law of peoples.John Rawls - 1999 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Edited by John Rawls.

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