Individual Responsibility for Promoting Global Health

If Global Health Impact labeling is successful, it will give companies a reason to produce drugs that will save millions of lives. One might wonder, however, whether consumers have any moral obligation to purchase goods from Global Health Impact–certified companies or whether purchasing these goods is even morally permissible. The fourth chapter suggests that, if the proposal is implemented, there is reason to purchase goods from Global Health Impact–certified companies. It defends something along the lines of this argument: (1) pharmaceutical companies violate rights and (2) do not do enough to address the access to medicines issue, so (3) if the Global Health Impact initiative helps rectify these problems, people should generally purchase goods from certified companies.

The Human Right to Health and the Virtue of Creative Resolve

Some maintain that people lack a human right to health because this right cannot provide guidance for distributing scarce resources. Even if the skeptics are right on this point, the second chapter suggests that is not a reason to reject the right; the role of the human right to health is to provide a kind of hope that can foster the virtue of creative resolve. This resolve is a fundamental commitment to finding creative solutions to what appear to be tragic dilemmas. Rather than helping one decide how to ration scarce resources, the human right to health provides reason to find ways to fulfill everyone’s claims. The hope this right provides gives us a response to apparent tragedy in motivating us to search for ways of avoiding it—rather than an account of distributive justice.

The Human Right to Health and Access to Essential Medicines

Living with untreated AIDS is devastating. Patients often suffer from terrible lesions, pneumonia, and nausea; become emaciated; have seizures; and eventually die. The first chapter argues that there should be an enforceable legal human right to health that includes a right to access essential medicines to treat diseases like AIDS. The chapter does not provide a complete account of the right’s basis; the right may also have to protect our basic equality and dignity, for instance. Nevertheless, it argues that health is necessary for, and partly constitutive of, a minimally good life. Lack of access to essential medicines characteristically undermines individuals’ ability to live such lives. So people should have a human right to health that grounds rights to access essential medicines.

Conclusion

Finally, the book concludes that even if creating a Global Health Impact label proves impossible, or undesirable, data on medicines’ health consequences are incredibly valuable. Researchers can use such data to look at the determinants and consequences of health impact, and international organizations and country-level ministries of health can use them to evaluate performance, set targets, and guide the distribution of health resources to countries. In short, better understanding the effect of key medicines on the global burden of disease will help policymakers better treat and prevent infectious diseases. Although data alone will not solve any of the health problems people face, the Global Health Impact index can help many people secure essential medicines that save millions of lives every year

Beyond Experimental Political Philosophy

The sixth chapter suggests that examining the prospects for a Global Health Impact labeling and certification campaign might expand the domain of traditional philosophical inquiry in an important way. It presents a proposal for testing consumers’ willingness to make decisions based on a Global Health Impact label. The basic idea is to put a Global Health Impact label on a few over-the-counter products and to collect data on changes in consumers’ willingness to purchase these products compared to otherwise similar generic versions of the products from sales. The chapter explains how carrying out this test might provide an example of a new kind of experimental philosophy. Although most experimental philosophy has focused on individuals’ intuitions and is modeled on the psychological literature, there is a lot of empirical work in other disciplines, and many useful methods are available for answering important questions experimental philosophers might want to address.

Consumption and Social Change

How should consumers think about their basic economic powers? The fifth chapter defends positive change consumption: under just institutions people should be free to consume as they like as long as they respect the institutions’ rules. In the absence of such institutions, there are significant moral constraints on consumption. Against recent critics, the fifth chapter argues that it is legitimate to aim at democratic change but that doing so is not always required. It argues that if democracy is too central, it can prevent truly positive change; but, at the same time, we must recognize the importance of democracy for bringing about such change.

Promoting Global Health

The third chapter presents the book’s new proposal for addressing the access to medicines problem. It suggests that by collecting and analyzing data on global health, people can come up with new ways to improve poor people’s access to essential drugs and technologies. It suggests utilizing information about medicines’ global health impact (organized by drug, disease, country, and company) to create incentives for positive change. One possibility is to give pharmaceutical companies with the most impactful drugs a Global Health Impact label to use on all their products. Highly rated companies will have an incentive to use the label to get a larger share of the market. Further, socially responsible investment companies could include Global Health Impact companies in their portfolios. Finally, having a Global Health Impact certification system for pharmaceutical companies would open the door to all kinds of fruitful social activism. One possibility is a Global Health Impact licensing campaign. Pharmaceutical companies rely, to a large extent, on university research and development. So, if universities allow only certified companies to benefit from their technology, companies will have an incentive to abide by Global Health Impact standards.