Social Theory and Practice

Volume 42, Issue 1, January 2016

Gabriele Badano
Pages 183-204

Still Special, Despite Everything
A Liberal Defense of the Value of Healthcare in the Face of the Social Determinants of Health

Recent epidemiological research on the social determinants of health has been used to attack an important framework, associated with Norman Daniels, that depicts healthcare as special. My aim is to rescue the idea that healthcare has special importance in society, although specialness will turn out to be mainly limited to clinical care. I build upon the link between Daniels’s theory and the work of John Rawls to develop a conception of public justification liberalism that is applicable to the field of justice and health. I argue that, from the perspective of public justification liberalism, (clinical) healthcare deserves special status.