Social justice and health

To explore what it means to achieve social justice in health is to try and explore two of the most contested and complex concepts that we have, and to work through to conclusions that are in common with them both. This is a considerable challenge. To try and address it, what follows will take the following strategy.
First, we will consider what makes health a distinctive area for exploration in its own right. In ontological terms, what can we say about health that marks it as a distinctive field? By trying to answer this question, we can then create a starting point for coming up with a range of factors that exploring social justice in terms of health will have to address. Next, having established our distinctive health factors, we can attempt to consider what each, and their combination, means in terms of social justice. This clearly means finding an appropriate theory of social justice that can address them. Once we have found such a theory, we can then attempt to combine the two to come to some conclusions. A range of theories of social justice have been laid out in an opening section (Section2) to this book, to which the reader is encouraged to refer.