The Duty to Aid the Deprived

In Chapters 4 and 5 , I explored the general requirements of the duties to avoid inflicting deprivations of health and to protect from such deprivations. In each chapter, I examined specific health hazards and set out how they cause deprivations of health, the reasons why these deprivations are morally significant, and what they tell us about the requirements of each of the proactive duties. This chapter takes a somewhat different approach, in that rather than focusing on one specific health problem to establish what it can reveal about the nature of our duties to other people, instead, the problems which are the focus of this chapter are practical in nature. As noted in the previous chapters, our ability to respond, proactively or reactively, to health hazards is constrained by the finite nature of the resources at our disposal and the limitations of medical and public health technology. We cannot always prevent or fully alleviate every health deprivation, so we are left with challenging questions about what we should do, when we cannot do everything that we might wish.