The Human Right to Health and the Virtue of Creative Resolve

Abstract

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.