Citation

Ngosso T. Int. J. Equity Health 2023; 22(1): e5.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group - BMC)

DOI

10.1186/s12939-022-01822-1

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The debate about global justice and health has focused so far on what developed countries owe to developing countries to advance global public health. Less attention has however been paid to the health obligations of developing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, towards their own people and how this may affect considerations about justice and health in a globalized world. This paper challenges the implicit presumption in global justice theories that African societies, because they are poor, have weaker health obligations toward their own peoples. It makes two main claims. First, despite their economic shortcomings, African governments should have the primary responsibility to protect the domestic side of the human right to health of their own citizens and dumping their own health obligations on rich countries is a disservice to the overall goal of global justice in health. Second, the health obligations of African societies towards their own people should be assessed and grounded also on their potential abilities, and not exclusively on their current abilities. Global justice in health cannot be reduced to what rich countries should do. It must include also what developing countries from Sub-Saharan Africa should do beyond accepting or managing any health assistance...

...There are at least two ways to approach the issue of identifying the moral agents who should make the human right to health effective for African citizens. To clarify these two approaches, consider Peter Singer's thought experiment about the drowning child [11]. Faced with this scenario, political philosophers have been mostly concerned with the questions to know what we should do for the drowning child or who should bear the responsibility to save the drowning child? When the question is framed that way, what matters most is the right the drowning child has to be rescued no matter who the rescuer should be. However, there is a second set of questions that are equally important but have been mostly 'ignored' by mainstream political theory, including the question concerning why so many children are drowning in the first place in many African societies. When the question is primarily framed that way, it points to the possibility of identifying who from the perspective of African societies bears the responsibility from preventing such a situation.

Language: en

Keywords

Global justice; Human right to health; Potential ability; Sub-Saharan Africa