Prof. Jonathan Wolff
The Human Right to Health: Further Thoughts
In 2012, I a published a short book called The Human Right to Health. However there were a number of concerns that I left unaddressed in that work, which I have considered in a series of other papers, including some jointly written work. In this talk I will explain the developments in the account and the reasons for them, as well as the underlying motivations of my work on this topic.
Dr. Diego Silva
Place, Power, and Pandemics
Place – i.e., a location with meaning to humans, to paraphrase Yi-Fu Tuan – should be a central concern to public health workers and researchers as they try to make sense of the COVID19 pandemic in preparation for future infectious disease outbreaks. I will (begin to) argue that political, ethical, and aesthetic elements of place have hereto gone underexamined in the context of public health and public health ethics, thereby obfuscating certain duties of governments and state actors toward their citizens and residents, particularly those who are socioeconomically marginalised.
Dr. Alexandra Phelan
Beyond Equity: Reparative Justice and Reckoning the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing
Negotiations on the pathogen access and benefit-sharing (PABS) Annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement have targeted a May 2026 World Health Assembly deadline for adoption. Whether that deadline is met or not, the terms on which the PABS system has been negotiated reflect a framing this presentation will argue is necessary but insufficient. While the PABS system may have been developed explicitly as an equity mechanism, I contend that genuine justice requires reparative approaches that global health governance has thus far been unwilling to adopt.
While distributive equity asks how future benefits should be shared more fairly, reparative justice asks what is owed, by whom, and for what. The long history of scientific extraction is not a serious of simple inequities: from colonial appropriation of Indigenous biological knowledge and resources, to developing H5N1 pandemic influenza vaccines prompting Indonesia to cease sample sharing in 2007, to punitive measures imposed on South Africa for transparent reporting of Omicron emergence during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a record of accumulating and uncompensated harm, whereby biological resources have flowed from the Global South to generate commercial value and benefits concentrated in the Global North.
The PABS Annex and negotiations, however, need not be seen as foreclosing a reparative turn. Expanding interpretations of States' duties to cooperate under international law, combined with the norm-developing authority of the Conference of the Parties, provide a plausible legal pathway toward a system that explicitly acknowledges historical biopiracy, grounds technology transfer and capacity-building obligations in debt rather than charity, and centers rights-holders.
Dr. Romina Rekers
The Human Right to Health Emergency Preparedness
This presentation argues that there is a human right to preparedness for health emergencies, regardless of whether healthcare is understood as a human right or as a conventional right grounded in political institutions. It claims that states shape and legitimize citizens’ expectations regarding healthcare protection while also imposing extraordinary burdens during emergencies. Preparedness therefore becomes a distinct normative obligation aimed at preserving healthcare protection during emergencies.
The presentation further argues that failures of preparedness may violate the principle of non-regression in the right to healthcare when foreseeable emergencies lead to avoidable declines in protection, such as reductions in hospital capacity. Drawing on debates about healthcare rights, resilience, and institutional responsibility, it explores how preparedness can reduce both the burdens of emergency responses and the frustration of legitimate expectations. It also considers broader implications for climate-related health risks, infectious diseases, and international cooperation.
Dr. Kanchana Mahadevan
Care Practices in Doulia Rights: Global Health Contexts of Transnational Nursing Migration
This paper will argue for “doulia rights” (Eva Kittay) and duties as grounded in the caring encounters of the materiality and experientiality of nursing practices in formal and informal contexts. Nursing activities in multicultural contexts reveal the need for an additional attentiveness and communicativeness of life-worlds (in a Habermasian sense) that transcend system world contexts in fulfilling their obligation to care. Their rights to health care could be similarly culled from life worlds of informal care. In the Indian context, for instance, Kittay’s doulia is akin to the dai, an unskilled birth attendant upon whom the poor, especially the rural, depend for giving care to the care giver. The lifeworld of the Indian dai is non-transactional and rooted in the community, but is nevertheless unrecognised and mired in the inequalities of caste, gender and institutionalized nursing. Doulia obligations and rights can learn from the dai to shift away from the limits of British colonial hierarchies of nurse as a one-way care giver in a “chain” to expand into a multiple ways of giving and receiving care in communities. Such understandings can speak to transnational contexts of health care which with wider domains of responsibilities and tensions that care givers experience in performing care work for strangers. In the course of its discussion, this paper will ponder over the questions that remain: Can the ideal of the doulia or dai be reconstructed without social inequalities? Does such an ideal provide resources for thinking about health rights by overcoming neo-liberal notions of rights?
Dr. Sarah Potthoff
Gendered Agency and Increase of Justice: Insights into Women’s Courts in Rural South India
Gender justice and social justice need to be conceptualized as relevant components of health; at the same time, socio-economic marginalization poses risks for the development of diseases and illnesses. For this reason, in this presentation, I will highlight women's courts in rural South India as women-centered spaces that challenge the normative intimate order, feminize the public sphere, and refashion and change gender and ethnic relations in these rural areas. Thereby I argue that family is both a source of support and constraint, and that the interventions of the women’s court members both resist and address social relations within extended families over time, often using societal alliances to increase women’s socio-economic entitlements. I will show how participation in these women's courts enhances their members’ freedom of movement, social respect, and agency, thereby contributing to their health.
Dr. phil. Mónica Cano Abadía
A Feminist Philosophical Perspective of Ethics of Medical AI
Drawing on fieldwork within European AI projects in radiology, digital pathology, and predictive-risk scoring, this paper probes the reach of principlism in medical-AI ethics. Mobilising feminist philosophy of science (especially Helen Longino’s critique of objectivism, alongside standpoint theory and situated-knowledge accounts) I expose how seemingly neutral data, categories, and standards tacitly encode values and bias. I develop analytic tools for scrutinising these classificatory practices and trace their consequences for equity, recasting “trustworthiness” as an epistemic prerequisite of global health justice.
Mercury Shitindo
From Subjects to Sources: Relational Ethics and Global Health Justice
Global health justice theory has made significant advances in addressing equitable access to medicines, health technologies, and research benefits. Yet a structural asymmetry remains at its core: populations most affected by global health inequity are often treated primarily as the subjects of justice, those to whom principles apply - while the normative frameworks governing health and research continue to be shaped predominantly by Northern intellectual traditions.
This presentation argues that such asymmetry is not simply a representational deficit but a justice problem internal to global health theory itself. Drawing on the concept of ethical quieting, the systematic marginalisation of non-Western normative frameworks in global health governance, the paper examines how certain forms of global health reasoning exclude affected communities and traditions from shaping the justificatory terms under which they are governed.
The argument is developed through two domains: the governance of reproductive technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa, and questions of relational accountability in climate-sensitive health research. In both cases, African relational ethical traditions, including Ubuntu-informed understandings of personhood and responsibility, are approached not as local cultural supplements but as philosophical resources that challenge the individualist assumptions underlying dominant global justice frameworks.
The paper contends that a more adequate account of global health justice must treat affected communities not only as recipients of just arrangements but also as contributors to the normative architecture through which justice is defined.
Dr. Derek Andrews
Patient Exclusion from the Epistemic Activities of Psychiatry: A Multifaceted Injustice?
Persons with mental disorders have long been excluded from the epistemic of psychiatry, such as in the creation and revision of psychiatric diagnostic categories. For example, the American Psychiatric Association has never sought patient input in the creation and revision processes of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and, indeed, has even refused calls to include patients on the grounds that doing so would compromise the manual’s scientific objectivity. Although recent work in the philosophy of science indicates that such refusals are largely unfounded, as a diversity in perspectives in knowledge creation tends to improve scientific objectivity, not compromise it, resistance to the inclusion of patients in the epistemic activities of psychiatry remains widespread.
As others have argued, I claim that categorically excluding patients from the epistemic activities of psychiatry constitutes an injustice against persons with mental disorders. However, I further suggest that the nature of this injustice is multifaceted, insofar as it is not a single kind of epistemic injustice, but rather proceeds along several distinct, but interrelated, axes. Accordingly, I propose that responding to the exclusion of persons with mental disorders from the epistemic activities of psychiatry requires a recognition of the structure and source of the injustices such an exclusion constitutes.
In this paper, I provide an account of the injustice that the categorical exclusion of patients from the epistemic activities of psychiatry. I claim that this amounts to a “layered” form of injustice, insofar as it amounts to not only (1) a form of preemptive testimonial injustice and (2) a form of hermeneutic injustice, but may also constitute a form of the denial of (3) the right to rational justifications for the normative relations to which one is subject, and of (4) the right to co-create those selfsame relations. I further suggest that these injustices result not only from the erroneous belief that individuals with mental disorders are essentially less rational or epistemically unreliable, but also, at least in part, from dogmatic assumptions widely held in modern psychiatry regarding the nature of relevant expertise and its sources.
Dr. med. Christin Hempeler
When is Treatment Pressure Coercive? Accounting for Power Imbalances in Mental Healthcare
Within mental healthcare, professionals frequently use various forms of treatment pressure to increase service users’ adherence to recommended treatment. Treatment pressures encompass a range of communicative strategies - such as persuasion, interpersonal leverage, offers, and threats - that aim to influence service users’ decision-making. Following baseline theories of coercion, it is commonly assumed that only certain threats amount to informal coercion, while other forms of treatment pressure are not considered coercive.
In this talk, I argue that such an understanding of informal coercion is insufficiently sensitive to context and fails to recognize the fundamental power imbalance in mental healthcare. Drawing on a set of counterexamples, I develop a context-sensitive account of informal coercion that takes service users’ perspectives into account. This account challenges the widespread belief that only threats can be coercive.
Prof. Dr. med. Mirjam Faissner
Epistemic Oppression in Healthcare: Strategic Nondisclosure as a Form of Testimonial Smothering
Members of marginalized groups, such as those affected by cis-heterosexism, racism, or ableism, often strategically do not disclose relevant information in healthcare settings to avoid negative repercussions. For instance, a person who uses drugs may stay silent about their substance use; a person with chest pain may withhold their psychiatric diagnosis in an emergency setting; and a woman experiencing mental distress might avoid mentioning how racism affects her well-being.
In this paper, I introduce the concept of strategic nondisclosure as a special form of testimonial smothering. Testimonial smothering, as defined by Kristie Dotson, is a form of epistemic oppression in which a speaker self-silences their testimony to avoid misunderstanding and harm due to the listener’s lack of understanding. I will demonstrate that strategic nondisclosure is a form of testimonial smothering that unfolds in a specific way in healthcare contexts. I provide an empirically grounded account of strategic nondisclosure in healthcare that explains the underlying social and epistemic dynamics within healthcare, and draw ethical implications for healthcare institutions.
I first present the central features of strategic nondisclosure, demonstrating that it affects socially marginalized healthcare users who conceal content related to their marginalization. The decision not to disclose is typically based on the speaker's judgment that the healthcare provider lacks sufficient competence. I sketch important epistemic, emotional, and health-related harms of strategic nondisclosure in healthcare. In the second section, I demonstrate that strategic nondisclosure constitutes a form of testimonial smothering, highlighting its specificities. I show that strategic nondisclosure is sustained by ‘pernicious ignorance’ within healthcare institutions. In the third section, I discuss the ethical implications of this analysis, arguing that healthcare professionals and institutions bear specific hermeneutical responsibilities towards marginalized healthcare users.