Abstract

Why should we care about global health? What obligations do we have to improve global health? How can we work towards establishing a health industry that is better equipped to deal with the most significant global health challenges? In her impressive and ambitious book, Global Health Impact: Extending Access to Essential Medicine (Hassoun, 2020), Nicole Hassoun attempts to answer these questions, by drawing on contemporary research in political philosophy, global justice, health economics and business ethics. In this symposium, Timothy Campbell, Yukiko Asada and Andreas Albertsen explore three dimensions of Hassoun’s proposal: the relation between measuring global health impact and conceptions of the minimally good life, different metrics used to measure the global health burden and democratic consumption and social justice. In a response paper, Hassoun responds to the critical remarks.In her book, Hassoun presents a theoretical framework that explains why we ought to care about global health, develops a way of measuring the global health impact of health technologies and argues that individuals should be guided by this in their consumption. The book presents an ambitious proposal for how one in a very practical way can use the measuring tool in order to promote global health by labeling and certifying different market products so that consumers and investors get incentivizing information that can change their behavior in a way that promotes global health.