Essay on "Health Care Right or Privilege"

Essay 5 pages (1856 words) Sources: 5

[EXCERPT] . . . .

We have to find a balance between units of good that change in different allocations, and an arbitrary, mechanistic application of 'fairness' that demands every stakeholder with the right to the social good, gets exactly the same amount regardless of how much return that allocation delivers. I answer that not all factors are the same in every situation, there are a potentially infinite number of possible unique situations, and while consistency and fairness may be agreeable objectives, the greatest good may require violating them in the inevitable new or unusual situation. As R. M Hare points out, the question becomes what is possible at the time, rather than a theoretical abstract that may be perfect but unachievable (1963, p. 55). This would make mine a pragmatic moral viewpoint like "if claimants have the right to the resource, divide the resource between them such that the greatest possible good is delivered, in such a way that I would apply the division were I one of the claimants." If sacrifice for the greater good is a virtue, the reward may be greater for myself if I know I have been an asset rather than a burden to my society. This places my viewpoint within a rationalist-idealist, pluralistic 'Golden-rule' Utilitarianism not unlike what Gensler calls a "contemporary restatement of Kant's approach" (1998, p. 117) to a problem that is widely discussed, but too often reduced to inappropriate simplification. Rorty quotes Dewey defining a pragmatic goal as "a social hope reduced to a working program of action" (2007, p. 917), which may be the best we can hope for out of this situation.

References

Brownstein, B. (1980). Pareto optimality, external benefits and public goods: a subjectivist approach. The Journal of Libertarian Studies, IV (1), 93-106. Retrieved from mises.org/journals/jls/4_1/4_1_6.pdf

Gensler, H. (1998). Ethics: a contemporary introduction. New York: Routledge.

Glannon, W. (2005). Biomedical ethics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hare, R. (1963). Freedom and reason. London: Oxford University Press.

Rorty, R. (2007).… READ MORE

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