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  • Title: Applying Rawls to medical cases: an investigation into the usages of analytical philosophy.
    Author: Shevory TC.
    Journal: J Health Polit Policy Law; 1986; 10(4):749-64. PubMed ID: 3457860.
    Abstract:
    John Rawls's Theory of Justice has been widely and correctly recognized as a tremendous intellectual accomplishment. It has been applauded as a comprehensive and satisfying approach to the problem of defining justice. Health policy analysts and medical ethicists have thus been inspired to apply Rawls's principles to various health care issues. The result has not been greater coherence in approaches to issues of policy and ethics, leading the author to question the validity of Rawls's analytical approach. During the past 15 years, John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press; 1971) has influenced the literature on health policy, although Rawls did not address himself to this subject. Shevory attempts to evaluate the validity of Rawls' analytic approach by assessing its use by authors discussing the allocation of medical resources and other bioethical issues. He summarizes arguments grounded in the Rawlsian theory of justice in the writings of Norman Daniels, Nora Bell, Ronald Green, James Childress, Marc Basson, Gerald Winslow, John Troyer, Karen M. Tait, Marc Lappé, and others. Shevory categorizes Rawls' work as "a revised and very sophisticated version of older liberal theories of justice." As such, the open-endedness that accommodates competing claims of justice makes it very difficult to apply its principles to individual cases and to arrive at answers that can be used in formulating public policy.
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