This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warerton.

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W.w. dot philosophy.com. If we want to achieve a just society, one with fair

and equal opportunity, should we be striving to reduce health inequalities?

Of course we should.

But how?

As Harvard philosopher Norman Daniels explains, this isn't a simple matter. Health inequalities arise not just

from unequal access to health care itself, social status and wealth affect health too.

Norman Daniels, welcome to Philosophy Bites. It's a pleasure to be here and I hope we have a good conversation.

The topic we're focusing on today is the philosophy of healthcare.

That sounds like an unusual topic for a philosopher to be interested in.

How did you get into that?

Well, I can give you a somewhat autobiographical account,

and it may not be a route that anyone else would follow.

But I was trained as a philosopher of science and the reason I went into philosophy of science was to learn more about theory acceptance.

So it became interesting to me in the early 70s that several theories of justice were advanced.

There was Rawls' theory in 1971, there was Nozix's reply in 1974,

there was a dominant background of a utilitarian approach in many countries.

So it seemed plausible to ask which theory is correct and how do we judge what's correct and would there be any evidence?

So I somewhat naively thought that our agreement,

which was pretty hypothetical, given that I was from the US.

...