ABSTRACT
The conflict between the holders of patent rights in antiretroviral anti-AIDS medicines and the interests of a significant proportion of the population of the Republic of South Africa represents a set of problems of increasing gravity for everyone. We can expect repeatedly to face the same problem over the foreseeable and for that matter the unforeseeable future, nationally and internationally, in the developing nations and in the developed ones. Moreover, it is a practical problem whose optimal solution involves so many imponderable considerations and so much potentially contested theorydescriptive and normative-that solving it requires little short of an international crash program by welfare economists, political theorists, and moral philosophers. In this chapter, I make a philosopher’s first stab at a possible solution.
