Norman Daniels

Jon Mandle and David A. Reidy, eds., The Rawls Lexicon, (CUP, forthcoming 2014)

Cross references: health and healthcare; reflective equilibrium; liberty and liberties; fair equality of opportunity; justice between generations; equality; luck egalitarianism; G. A. Cohen; Amartya Sen Norman Daniels (b. 1942), currently Professor of Ethics and Population Health at the Harvard School of Public Health, is one of the philosophers who have done most to explore and enrich Rawls's approach to social justice. Daniels was a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard, although his own dissertation was not in moral or political philosophy, but concerned with Thomas Reid's treatment of geometry, and was supervised not by Rawls but by Hilary Putnam. Over the course of his career, Daniels has stood in a number of relations to Rawls's theory -from early critic, to extender and systematizer, through to acting as a defender of Rawls against a range of later critics.

Daniel I. Wikler (born 1946) is currently Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics and Professor of Ethics and Population Health in the Department of Global Health and Population of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. He was a core faculty member in the Harvard Program in Ethics and Health (PEH) until its closure in mid-2011. His current research interests are ethical issues in population and international health, including the allocation of health resources, health research involving human subjects, organ transplant ethics, and ethical dilemmas arising in public health practice, and he teaches several courses each year. He is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.[1], Contents [show], [edit]Overview, Professor Wikler’s published work addresses many issues in bioethics, including issues in reproduction, transplantation, and end-of-life decision-making. His current interests address bioethical issues arising in a populatio...

Kerman University of Medical Sciences, 2014

Here is a health policy riddle: despite the fact that we are not always clear as to what we are trying to achieve, even on the most basic level, we must make policy anyway. Odder still: this is as we might expect it to be, and perhaps even as it should be. After all, part of what makes health policy important is precisely the fact that it raises critical questions about our most basic human values and social commitments. The conversation should be fluid. Norman Daniels has long been an important participant in these conversations. Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly—a titular play on his 1985 book, Just Health Care (1)—is Daniels’s attempt to wrestle with contemporary challenges that have forced him to rethink his positions. At its most basic level, then, Just Health can be read as a reminder of the tentativeness of scholarly positions on the core questions of health as well as the importance of being willing to revise both the questions we ask and the positions we take. In Just Health care, Daniels identified six important areas of concern: 1. Adequate nutrition, 2. Sanitary, safe, unpolluted living and working conditions, 3. Exercise, rest, and such important lifestyle features as avoiding substance abuse and practicing safe sex, 4. Preventive, curative, rehabilitative, and compensatory personal medical services (and devices), and 5. Nonmedical personal and social support services (pp. 42–3). Just Health adds a sixth critical component: other social determinants of health. To get to this level, Daniels uses early chapters to establish the “special moral importance of health” as an object of inquiry (Chapter 2), and to look beyond healthcare to a more-inclusive and socially-expansive view of health (Chapter 3). As Daniels notes, “bioethics has not looked ‘upstream’ from the point of delivery of medical services to the role of the healthcare system in improving population health.” As a result, it tends to miss “the distribution of social goods that determine the health of societies”. The point is clear since—in the 21st century—health can no longer be served a la carte; we must think systemically. Hence Daniels’s larger point is that “social justice in general is good for population health and its fair distribution” (p. 82).

Hastings Center Report, 1998

2010

Motl Brody, a twelve year old Hasidic Jew, died recently in Washington. During his last days, his life and death were the subject of intense media scrutiny, judicial proceedings, and bioethical commentary. His transition from life to death was marked not by the private mourning of friends and family, but by cost-benefit calculations and legal wrangling. The legal, economic, and bioethical considerations are symptoms of a larger conflict between how religious communities and medical science handle the difficult business of death. ...

The American Journal of Bioethics, 2011

Nearly a year ago when a set of commentaries on the impact of personalities on bioethics was proposed to the bioethics community, it was received with warm embraces and fiery criticism. Some argued that the idea was novel and creative to pay homage to the individuals and ideologues who have advanced liberal and conservative positions in our field over the last four decades. Others argued that the entire premise was polarizing and that highlighting the figures who had put their ideologies and their political positions front and center did not serve us well. Perhaps both positions have merit, but ultimately, my idea behind soliciting this set of commentaries was to consider the role of personalities (polarizing and otherwise) in advancing the arguments, causes, and positions in public bioethics. Whether comedians as social commentators on bioethical issues, political activists, politicians, or healthcare reformers, my claim is that personalities in fact do drive bioethical discourse.

American Journal of Bioethics, 2022

Blumenthal-Barby et al. (forthcoming) present a nuanced and convincing case for the continued presence of moral and political philosophers in bioethics. We agree with the authors that philosophers should have a role in bioethical inquiry. However, we partly disagree on what that role should be. We assess the case taking our clues from a concern the authors mentionand another one that they do not directly address.

História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, 2022

Entrevista com Christopher Hamlin, feita em novembro de 2020, na qual ele explica como se interessou pela história da saúde pública, fala sobre as consequências das epidemias, sobre a relação entre confiança na ciência e imaginação moral, por que historiadores levantam experiências passadas de saúde pública para pensar a respeito do presente, sobre o papel da disciplina e da ideologia nos arranjos para resolução de problemas de saúde pública e comenta a respeito do seu novo artigo sobre medicina legal.

Journal of medical ethics, 2009

Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 2019

, days before his 89 th birthday. A pioneering intellect who eschewed the confines of the academy to co-found the Hastings Center and launch a field, Dan was a crisp thinker, a certain writer, and a devout communitarian. And he was a fantastic mentor who shaped bioethics through his personal imprint on the many scholars who he trained and influenced. I am personally in his debt and while I mourn this loss, I am immensely grateful that Dan lived a full life pursuing ideas with passion and intelligence until his final days. Just weeks before he died he chaired a meeting at the Hastings Center on the ethics of climate change. Colleagues who were there say he was in fine form. Climate change. It was the latest issue to trigger Dan's capacious curiosity. 1 For decades he anticipated trends, first as a preeminent lay Catholic intellectual after Vatican II and editor of Commonweal, 2 then as a bioethicist. It would not be hyperbole to assert that Setting Limits 3 anticipated and catalyzed health care reform, and that The Troubled Dream of Life: Living with Mortality 4 was instrumental in prompting a national discussion about palliative care and how we die. Dan was always looking forward, and yet, his passing prompts us to look back. It is indisputable that his death represents a generational shift for bioethics, with the loss of one of its remaining founders.