The human right to health & its intersection with multiculturalism

• Main Author: Muyskens, Kathryn Lynn
• Other Authors: Andres Carlos Luco
• Format: Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Humanities::Philosophy
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/136751
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Human rights have been a popular topic in political philosophical literature. Recently, the human right to health has garnered increasing attention. Yet, the philosophical community has not adequately investigated the meaning of health and medicine, or explored how different interpretations may interact in multicultural contexts. How we define these key terms will have significant impact on how the human right to health is interpreted and how it will interact with other rights both within liberal democratic nations and in the international political realm. In this thesis, I will argue for a pluralistic definition of health and medicine. Though I argue that there is more than one valid conception of both health and medicine, there will still be some versions judged unacceptable or inadequate, thus constraining the possible acceptable expressions of health and medicine. As a whole, the thesis examines the relationships between health, culture, and political institutions. While other scholars have defended the inclusion of health in the list of human rights, the operant conception of health was under-defined. Human rights have a complicated relationship with international relations and have sometimes been accused of unjustly assuming Western values to be universal. In my thesis, I take the view that health is a universal good, but also a culturally laden concept, and thus there is a need to articulate how political bodies can respect the human right to health without perpetuating ethnocentric bias. This new understanding of health and healthcare will inevitably influence how the human right to health will be understood, and thus the later chapters of this thesis are devoted to exploring how cultural variations in health and medicine play out in domestic and international policy. I hope the arguments I make here will be useful for healthcare policy makers, humanitarian heath organizations, and medical practitioners, as well as informative for academics and lay people as to the value that health has for human well-being and its relationship with culture and identity.