The Ethics of Healthcare: Essential Kawaida Considerations

Summary

---

The Kawaida ethical tradition turns to Maatian ethical texts of the classical African civilization, Kemet (ancient Egypt), as an indispensable point of departure for its development of ethical positions and social policy. Within this Afrocentric framework some core principles of the Kawaida-Maatian position on healthcare emerge. Clearly, the fundamental principle which informs our position on healthcare is the ancient African ethical understanding that humans, the Husia teaches, are possessors of dignity and divinity and thus worthy of the highest respect. Moreover, the Husia teaches that humans are divinely endowed with life, the sustenance for life, equality of status and worth and free will, and moral and spiritual consciousness. With these four divine endowments come corresponding rights, i.e., the right to life, to sustenance for life, to equal treatment and self-determination, and to freedom of conscience.

Thirdly, healthcare must be posed as a shared and common good. It is of benefit to all that each of us has adequate healthcare and good health. There is a relationship of interdependence here where others' illness affects us, and others' wellness contributes to and reinforces our own. Indeed, insuring healthcare for all is also to ensure good for us all. Thus, the Husia teaches that "the good we do for others we are also doing for ourselves". For we are building the good world we all want and deserve to live in. Fourthly, healthcare is a requirement of social justice due to persons as human beings and members of a society. It speaks to creating die context and capacities to live a good life and to strive toward fulfillment and flourishing. Disease, disability and unwellness deny or diminish our capacity to achieve these goods and thus, healthcare is required to deal with these impairments to health. Moreover, key social determinants of health such as income and wealth, education and reliable information, healthy employment and environments, etc., must also be effectively addressed as central to healthcare and good health and as requirements of social justice.

[...] the corporate giants hide their role in raising costs and diminishing and denying needed care disguising it with misinformation, confusion and fear.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

The Ethics of Healthcare: Essential Kawaida Considerations

The issue of healthcare emerges as a central ethical issue of our time, as a matter of life and death, revealing the presence or absence of evidence of our claimed religious and societal respect for the dignity of the human person and the sacredness of human life. Thus, it becomes an unavoidable measure of the moral quality and claims of th...

See the full content of this document

---