A Constrained Concept of Health Inequality
This project redefines health inequality through contractualist justice to guide welfare state obligations and prioritization.
About the Project
This project aims to develop a normative reconceptualization of health inequality. The term, “health inequality” is a contestable concept involving a double-vagueness as both “health” and “inequality” allow for very different interpretations.
When health inequality is highlighted as a problem that welfare states should address, it is thus often unclear what the concept refers to – e.g., social inequality in life-expectancy, geographical inequality in access to hospital units, or gender inequality in wellbeing etc. A descriptive account of health inequality can cover all these but offers little to the question of which health inequalities the welfare state has an obligation to rectify, and how it should prioritize between them.
Rather than merely settling on a descriptive account, this project redefines health inequality from a background of contractualist justice.
Contact
Lasse Nilsen, PI
lasseni@sdu.dk
The research project is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, DFF 1.