Relational Equality and Health

Abstract

Health is important for a variety of reasons, perhaps most prominently because of its importance for individuals' well-being and ability to pursue different life plans. Not surprisingly, health has also become an increasingly interesting topic for political philosophers, who have sought to describe and address questions of justice arising in relation to health. This has included issues concerning the allocation of health-care resources 1 but also, more recently, attempts to take into consideration from the perspective of justice what we now know about the influence of social, economic, and political factors on health -the so-called "social determinants of health." 2 Much of this literature works from a predominantly distributive understanding of justice, that is, an understanding of justice that is concerned with the distributive patterns of relevant outcomes, such as welfare, resources, or health. In the recent debate about egalitarianism, however, the distributive approach has come under criticism for missing "the point" of equality. So-called "relational" egalitarians have proposed a different way of conceptualizing equality, which focuses not on distributions as inherently important but instead on the quality of social relations among citizens and/or the ways in which social institutions "treat" citizens. While this approach is gaining traction among philosophers, and its possible implications for different policy spheres -such as higher education, the distribution of income, and the structure of the

Not all biases are bad: equitable and inequitable biases in machine learning and radiology

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Advancing Global Health Equity in the COVID-19 Response: Beyond Solidarity

“…So far, we have taken a distributive view of justice. Relational egalitarians have proposed a different way of conceptualizing equity which focuses not on distributions as inherently important but instead on the quality of social relations among citizens and/or the ways in which social institutions “treat” citizens (Voigt and Wester 2015 ). In this context, other ways in which equity might be reflected in current and future pandemic responses is in the processes through which policies are designed and decided upon.…”

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“…Using real-world cases, I then suggest a number of ways in which individual policies can become problematic from this perspective. 1 I first became interested in the expressive dimension of state action as part of co-authored work on relational equality and health (Voigt and Wester 2015). I draw on this paper at various points in the discussion here.…”