The many faces of health justice

This paper develops the idea of health justice as a plural conception. It draws on the literature on justice from philosophy and economics, and investigates its application and reach in the space of health. Several distinctions are invoked in identifying and contrasting different facets of health justice and injustice. These include active versus passive injustice; process fairness versus substantive justice; comparative versus noncomparative justice; compensatory and distributive justice. Within distributive justice, the health implications of alternate principles – viz. equality, priority, sufficiency, and efficiency – are examined and evaluated. Many faces of health justice are thus exposed which help to address the varieties of injustice observed in the health sphere.