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The role of solidarity in social responsibility for health

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Abstract

The Article focuses on the concept of social solidarity, as it is used in the Report of the International Bioethics Committee On Social Responsibility and Health. It is argued that solidarity plays a major role in supporting the whole framework of social responsibility, as presented by the IBC. Moreover, solidarity is not limited to members of particular groups, but potentially extended to all human beings on the basis of their inherent dignity; this sense of human solidarity is a necessary presupposition for a genuinely universalistic morality of justice and human rights.

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Notes

  1. The word already features in the 1694 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française.

  2. For a comprehensive history of the idea in Europe, see Stjernø 2009; for a general overview of solidarity from several disciplinary perspectives, see Bayertz 1999a.

  3. R. Tuomela talks about “we-intentions”, contending that collective agency supervenes on individual agency (Tuomela 2005).

  4. For this kind of view, see Rorty 1989 and Rorty 1998; for sustained criticism, see Geras 1995.

  5. One noteworthy exception is the considerable number of papers collected in ter Meulen et al. 2001.

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Correspondence to Massimo Reichlin.

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Reichlin, M. The role of solidarity in social responsibility for health. Med Health Care and Philos 14, 365–370 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-011-9320-5

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