The Health Law Ethics
& Policy Seminar Series
presents
Jennifer
Prah Ruger
Yale University
Global Health Justice and governance
Thursday, March 10, 2011
12:30 – 2:00
Faculty of Law,
University of Toronto
84 Queen’s Park, Falconer
Hall, FA2-Solarium
Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2C5
Map
Everyone is welcome to attend, no registration
is required.
ABSTRACT
Is there a moral duty
to provide universal access to health care across nations? Global health inequalities
and externalities present compelling moral imperatives which demand a theory of
global health justice to justify and motivate a response. What are the
respective roles and responsibilities of global, national, and local
communities as well as individuals themselves to address health deprivations
and avert health threats? This paper offers the components of a theory of
global health justice, arguing for universal ethical norms (general duty) with
shared global and domestic responsibility (specific duties) for health care. It
offers a global minimalist view I call ‘provincial globalism’ as a mean between
nationalism and cosmopolitanism, in which a provincial consensus must accompany
a global consensus on health morality. This minimalist account asserts global
and national duties to promote human flourishing and, more specifically,
individuals’ central health capabilities. In this view, justice requires
prioritizing responsibilities through shared health governance to reduce
shortfall inequalities in central health capabilities—a general duty to reduce
premature mortality and escapable morbidity. It examines the difficulties
presented by the philosophical principles of connectedness, causality,
remediation, partiality, and capacity in the allocation of responsibility for
global health. It offers a theory of responsibility allocation based on a
functional, role-based and health agency centered understanding of the
analytical components required to solve global health problems and parcels out
roles and responsibilities at the global, national, local, and individual
levels accordingly. Allocations of responsibility rest on the effectiveness and
special obligations of different actors, respecting self-determination by
groups and individuals and seeking voluntary commitments. This view understands
that the remedy for global health problems must be sustainable to take nations
and the global health community to a new global health equilibrium that
remedies current problems and prepares for new health threats to come.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Ruger is an
associate professor at Yale University at the Schools of Public Health,
Medicine, and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Adjunct faculty at the
Law School. She is Senior Research Fellow at the MacMillan Center for International
and Area Studies and former Co-Director of the Yale-WHO Collaborating Centre
for Health Promotion, Policy and Research. She is a faculty associate of Yale’s
Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Center for Interdisciplinary Research
on AIDS (CIRA), and the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. She received a
bachelor’s degree in Political Economy from the University of
California-Berkeley, master’s degrees from Oxford University and the Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacy, and a doctoral degree from Harvard University.
Following a post-doctoral fellowship (Bell Fellowship) at Harvard's Center for
Population and Development Studies, she served on the health and development
satellite secretariat of WHO Director-General Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland's
Transition Team. She then worked as a health economist at the World Bank and
later served as Speechwriter to President James D. Wolfensohn. Previously she
worked as one of two non-partisan Health Policy Analysts for Massachusetts
Governor William Weld’s Task Force on the Health Care Industry, Governor’s
Council on Economic Growth and Technology. Dr. Ruger was a member of the
Institute of Medicine's Global Health Governance Working Group, Committee on
the U.S. Commitment to Global Health. She is currently a member of the
Institute of Medicine's Board on Global Health, Ethics Subcommittee of the
Advisory Committee to the Director at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), Institute of Medicine's Committee to Evaluate PEPFAR, and is
Chair of the Ethics Special Primary Interest Group (SPIG) of the American
Public Health Association.
A light lunch will be served.
For other upcoming Seminars please visit the Seminar webpage or contact m.casco@utoronto.ca
The
Health Law Ethics and Policy Workshop series brings local,
national, international scholars and policy makers as guest speakers to the
Faculty of Law, University of Toronto to stimulate discussion of
issues related to the intersection of law with health care and related ethical
and social issues. It is organized by the Faculty’s Health Law group and
sponsored by the CIHR Training Program in Health Law, Ethics and Policy.
The program funds graduate students in the unique multi-disciplinary field of
Health Law, Ethics and Policy based at four top universities in Canada.
For more information on the program, please visit our website at: www.healthlawtraining.ca
