ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on questions of health care resource distribution. It shows how approaching ethical theorizing as an explanatory project will lead us to surprising conclusions regarding which case-specific questions have answers that moral theorizing can reveal. Thought experiments such as these are ubiquitous in the literature on the distribution of health care resources. The rest of the health care resources are controlled by governments, insurance companies, medical charities, hospitals, and medical professionals. It may be plausible to say, for instance, that there is a true distributive principle that takes health care resources as its distribuend. The important point is that contractarianism/contractualism has its greatest plausibility when applied to collective entities such as corporations, charities, and states. The first horn is the claim that the class of goods to which the true distributive principle applies is some very large class of goods encompassing health care resources and other goods besides.
