Religious Perspectives on Social Responsibility in Health by Joseph Tham Chris Durante & Alberto García Gómez

Author:Joseph Tham, Chris Durante & Alberto García Gómez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

10.2 The Right to Health

Health has been defined in the WHO Constitution as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity,” and the same document also affirmed that “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being.” This expansive concept of a right to health can also be found reflected in the various sub-points of Article 14.2, of which we are mainly considering 14.2a. As with Chia, I also note that the Report of the International Bioethics of UNESCO on Social Responsibility and Health (IBC report, Paras 22–24) proposed two philosophical concepts of health and discussed their limitations. Leaving aside the nonmedical aspects of such a right, this begs not only the question of attainability, as outlined in paragraph 18 of the same report, but also the question of whether applying an ambitious reading of this right is considered appropriate in the various sociopolitical and cultural contexts around the world. Fan argued that this is not compatible with the Confucian outlook and proceeded to reject the radical egalitarian interpretation of “the highest attainable standard of health” (see next section).

Given the realities of daily life where, even in the most affluent of societies, inequalities of access to top treatments exist, not only by design but also due to serendipity and other factors which cause certain modalities of therapies to be developed in one place rather than another, is it appropriate to consider whether all available technologies (shown to be of benefit to patients) should be universally and equally distributed or that everybody in the world be given equal access, no matter how?

The Catholic approach would not see this as appropriate. The CCC teaches that “Life and physical health are precious gifts entrusted to us by God. We must take reasonable care of them” (CCC, para 2288), but “If morality requires respect for the life of the body, it does not make it an absolute value” (CCC, para 2289). Traditional Catholic medical ethics speak of ordinary and extraordinary means of therapy (which can cause confusion due to conflation between the philosophical usage with the everyday usage of the words ordinary and extraordinary); a clearer exposition of the concept can be found in the 1980 Declaration on Euthanasia which discussed it in terms of proportionate and disproportionate means (Declaration on Euthanasia, Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith 1980, Section IV, Due Proportion in the Use of Remedies). In this way, Catholic medical ethics would not support this type of right to health.

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