Human Right to Health, Social Rights and Human Dignity versus Relativist Challenge of Neoliberal Capitalism

Human rights to health and health care have developed considerably since they were first codified after World War Two and now, they are regulated in many international and national legal documents. Nevertheless, health rights still face many challenges. They are among the most contested, incompletely conceptualized human rights and the least enforceable rights. This paper argues that the greatest challenges and difficulties in health rights stem from the global expansion of neoliberal capitalism to which positivist epistemology is complacent. These problems entail the relativist challenge to the universality of human dignity and the neglect of fundamental values such as caring, empathy and respect for human dignity. The neoliberal capitalist mindset leads to an erosion of empathy, which translates into hostility towards, or at least neglect of, social human rights. All this contributes to the normalization of narrow understandings of health and the human right to health and to the problematic development of health rights. The commodification of health care led to a paradigm shift in the health sector creating an impersonal, profit-centric relationship. The insufficient role of the World Health Organization is one of the main reasons for the underdevelopment of health rights. Nor can the concept of sustainable development be seen as truly inclusive and conducive to the development of viable health rights, as the problems in the development of universal health coverage show. This paper suggests that the creation of fully-fledged health rights is not a problem of resource scarcity or lack of legal norms — but primarily a problem of scarcity of care and empathy, and a lack of understanding of the universality of human dignity. To make health and health care full-fledged human rights requires, first and foremost, a cultural transformation and mental revival, which would revive care, empathy, and dignity; the development of social rights that are indispensable for the protection of human dignity; and the implementation of a solidaristic perspective with full decommodification of health care.