ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the requirements of justice in health care at an intersocietal and international level. It also investigates what various different accounts of justice involve, and what policies, in present circumstances, those agents and agencies capable of affecting health care provision might, accordingly, be expected to adopt. Any credible account of obligations or of justice upholds the above implications for action, which apply to agents and agencies able to make a difference, whether they recognise all this or not. The Journal of Medical Ethics in particular has carried little or nothing on international disparities of health and health care, to judge from its own ‘Thematic review of past issues’. Yet health and sickness know no boundaries, any more than morality and justice do; and it is high time for some of the global aspects of medical ethics to be explored and debated, as well as more circumscribed and familiar issues.
