The problems of global health are truly terrible. Millions suffer and die from diseases like tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and malaria. One way of addressing these problems is via a Global Health Impact labeling campaign (http://global-health-impact.org/). If even a small percentage of consumers promote global health by purchasing Global Health Impact products, the incentive to use this label will be substantial. One might wonder, however, whether consumers are morally obligation to purchase any these goods or whether doing so is even morally permissible. This paper suggests that if the proposal is implemented, purchasing Global Health Impact labelled goods is at least morally permissible, if not morally required. Its argument should, moreover, be of much more general interest to those considering different kinds of ethical consumption.
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If this is not true of every company, the argument here can be modified appropriately.
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This does presume that agents besides states can violate rights, but the conception of rights at issue may still be institutional. See discussion below.
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It is more plausible that, to violate rights, patents have to make people worse off than they could otherwise be. This paper will, however, set aside the question of whether or not any “oughtimplies-can” clause is appropriate for constraining human rights claims.
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It is obviously impossible to fully defend this claim here. Nonetheless, I believe it is unlikely that companies could argue that their obligations to share-holders — or other stake-holders — outweigh, or over-ride, obligations to respect the basic human rights at issue.
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Significant argument would be necessary to show that these apparent rights violations are spurious or justified.
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See Hassoun, supra note 11.
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See Nickel, supra note 35. The leaves the question of what constitutes adequate protection quite open; it need only preclude protections that fail to prevent widespread deprivation.
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Moreover, companies may sign corporate codes of conduct and have something like a duty of fair play to extend access on essential medicines to the poor given that they are granted monopoly protection of new inventions via patents. See N.Hsieh, “Voluntary Codes of Conduct For Multinational Corporations: Coordinating Duties of Rescue and Justice,”Business Ethics Quarterly16, no. 2 (2006): 119-135; UN Global Compact, The Ten Principles (New York, United Nations, 2013). United Nations Global Compact. 2013. “Overview of the UN Global Compact.”New York, NY: United Nations.
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See Hollis and Pogge, supra note 48, at Ch. 6.
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Perhaps some of the arguments below about the obligations of individual consumers can be extended to say much more about companies' individual obligations.
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Further philosophical work is necessary here to state this more precisely. Perhaps saying something like “at least one of its major causal determinants” will suffice if one can explain what counts as “major.”
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See Boldrin and Levine, supra note 1, at 241-276.
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See Bessen, supra note 39.
62.
See Nickel, supra note 35; Hassoun, supra note 11.
63.
Id. (Nickel). The idea here is not just that capacities but social role matters and this seems to drive much of the discussion of companies' responsibilities with respect to access to important medicines, in particular. See J.-Y.Lee and P.Hunt, “Human Rights Responsibilities of Pharmaceutical Companies in Relation to Access to Medicines,”Journal of Law Medicine & Ethics40, no. 2 (2012): 220-233.
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Id. (Nickel).
65.
Id. (Nickel).
66.
See Lee and Hunt, supra note 63.
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Significant philosophical work is necessary to explain what being well-placed amounts to exactly. Here we are only concerned with the right to access important medicines. If, however, we were concerned to promote health more generally, some institutions may be well-placed to help people access essential medicines, while others are well-placed to help them access the social determinants of health. All things considered, those who can help people access the social determinants of health might have greater responsibility for taking action given the importance of these determinants to promoting health. Though, presumably, institutions well-placed to promote access to important medicines should still do so.
68.
See Hassoun, supra note 3.
69.
See Hassoun, supra note 11.
70.
The idea that, in principle, the obligations correlative to all rights are held universally, or collectively, helps respond to Onora O'Neil's worry that there are no in-principle obligation bearers for positive rights. See O.O'Neill, “The Dark Side of Human Rights,”International Affairs81, no. 2 (2005): 427-439; see Hassoun, supra note 3.
71.
This line of argument is suggested by Thomas Dunfee's nice adaptation of Peter Singer's pond argument to the case of corporations' duties to respond to the AIDS epidemic. See T.Dunfee, “Do Firms with Unique Competencies for Rescuing Victims of Human Catastrophes Have Special Obligations? Corporate Responsibility and the AIDS Catastrophe in Sub-Saharan Africa,”Business Ethics Quarterly16, no. 2 (2006): 185-210.
72.
Of course, these can always be improved: see N.Shah, “Pharmaceutical Supply Chains: Key Issues and Strategies for Optimisation,”Computers and Chemical Engineering28 (2004): 929-941.
73.
See Lee and Hunt, supra note 63.
74.
See the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, 2013, available at <http://www.theglobalfund.org/en/> (last visited April 29, 2016); International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations, 2013, available at <http://www.ifpma.org/> (last visited May 5, 2016).
75.
The average company making a contribution is alleviating <2% of the burden of these diseases. A rough rule of thumb for assigning responsibility might be this: Other things equal, if essential medicines received their proportional share of research and development funding, what percentage of the global burden of disease would each company have to alleviate for the companies together to address the access problem? Back of the envelop calculations of contributions suggest that it is unlikely that most companies are fulfilling their obligations for the diseases in the index. See: Hassoun, supra note 6; Hassoun, supra note 4.
76.
L.Murphy, “Institutions and the Demands of Justice,”Philosophy & Public Affairs27, no. 4 (1998): 251-291.
77.
Moreover, many consumers vote for, and support, governments that help extend rights-violating intellectual property rights internationally and set research and development priorities that do not address global needs.
78.
I set aside hard questions about merely doing vs. intending actions that do have bad consequences (or would otherwise violate rights).
79.
Though patents do restrict access to some drugs, there are many different HIV/AIDS medicines under patent, for instance. See WHO, supra note 33.
80.
The conclusion that individuals are implicated in rights violations would follow on many different accounts of responsibility. It will suffice for this paper's purposes if the kind of responsibility at issue is some kind of moral liability.
Moreover, it is plausible that we are all implicated in the causal process by which companies are able to violate rights and fail to fulfill their moral obligations – though we can describe this process many ways. See: C.Lepora and R.Goodin, On Complicity and Compromise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
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E.Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
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A.Walton, “The Common Arguments for Fair Trade,”Political Studies61, no. 3 (2013): 691-706.
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It is also unfortunate that it is the sickest members of developed countries that will bear the burden but, again, our world is not ideal.
86.
W.Hussain, “Is Ethical Consumerism an Impermissible Form of Vigilantism?”Philosophy and Public Affairs40, no. 2 (2012): 111-143, at 123, nt. 16.
