Global Health

Global health ethics looks to the moral obligations, entitlements, and freedoms of persons and peoples, as well as focusing on institutions and organisations, and their roles and duties. As a field of ethical inquiry, it requires attention to practical realities of moral pluralism. And it demands recognition of a global system that functions as an international order of sovereign nation states, albeit with both economic and political structures that operate at transnational levels. This chapter explores and explains these points. First, it discusses the nature and scope of global health itself. It then explores how it is essential within global health ethics to identify and speak to the practical roles, remits, and responsibilities of different global health actors, Finally, it highlights some of the pressing theoretical and practical ethical challenges in the context of global health ethics.