Viewing Health as a Human Right: On the Normative Framework Linking Health to Human Rights

The current global health literature is skeptical of the idea that one can defensibly claim a moral right to health. Gopal Sreenivasan and Onora O’Neill argue that a positive right to health is fraught with conceptual difficulties because it is unclear who bears the correlative duty to secure the right. Jonathan Wolff has recently attempted to provide a normative foundation for the human right to health from a non-cosmopolitan point of view, but his account fails to directly address Sreenivasan and O’Neill’s objections. In this paper, I will develop and further substantiate Wolff’s position in an attempt to respond to Sreenivasan and O’Neill’s critique of a positive right to health. I will argue that Wolff unknowingly seems to be making a case for a negative right to health, which I conclude provides a non-cosmopolitan normative foundation for the human right to health.