Health Rights, Correlativity, and Moral Priorities

Join our Initiative’s first event to discuss the fundamental nature of the right to healthcare with our guest speaker, Michael Da Silva.

The right to healthcare remains notoriously difficult to define and operationalize. Some scholars challenge the claimed right on the basis that it is not correlative to a duty and so cannot meet philosophical strictures on the use of the term ‘right.’ Others challenge accounts of rights committed to correlativity on the grounds that they fail to recognize the importance of goods that are not plausibly the subjects of correlative rights, including health goods. Still others suggest attempts to identify correlative health rights unduly favour access to healthcare over more important population-level health interventions. This talk provides an overview of recent work trying to articulate a plausible account of the right to healthcare that can meet necessary philosophical strictures on the use of the term ‘right’ without distorting moral priorities.

Michael Da Silva is currently a Lecturer at Southampton Law School. Prior to this, Michael served as the Alex Trebek Postdoctoral Fellow in AI and Healthcare at the University of Ottawa, where he worked on the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)-funded ‘Machine MD’ project on health-related AI. His expertise on these issues led to his work on Health Canada’s External Reference Group on the Development of Regulatory Requirements for Adaptive Machine Learning-Enabled Medical Devices. Among other roles, Michael has also served as a CIHR Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the McGill University Faculty of Law and Institute for Health and Social Policy, a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia, and a Foreign Law Clerk at the Supreme Court of Israel. He is a member of the New York Bar.