Distributive Justice and Resource Conservation

The health care industry is not faced with a shortage of medical supplies for basic needs that must be rationed. Given that some regions experience medical oversaturation and a proliferation of elective treatments, while medical deserts and physician care-drain characterize other regions, it seems, rather, that the current health care system simply does not prioritize care for all. Medical resources are funneled into lifestyle procedures to

satisfy inconsequential demands, while other areas of health care have little support.477

The current Western health care industry displays a deep unwillingness to allocate

resources equitably and an inability to grasp the seriousness of environmental destruction in the face of unnecessary medical resource use. Therefore, green bioethics seriously examines how much time, energy, resources, and how many health care professionals are misappropriated by providing special access to non-medical treatments while the majority of the world is without basic medical care.

To attend to environmental conservation, the medical industry must simultaneously enlarge the supply of essential medical resources to those in the

developing world and reduce elective medical consumerism in the developed world. As Jürgen Moltmann comments, “The relationship between progress and equilibrium in human and natural systems must be brought to into coordinated, fluid equilibrium.”478 It is reckless to increase the consumptive lifestyle of the developing world until it matches that of the developed. That would result in exceeding current resource use.479 Rather, a redirection of medical resources through distributive justice is needed.

477 _{One might also consider how veterinarian medicine for domestic animals absorbs enormous amounts of}

intellectual labor, time, and money. Veterinarians could not supply health care to humans, but the amount of money that people spend on increasing the standard of their pets’ lives, and prolonging pets’ lives with surgeries, medication, specialty food, and even acupuncture, betrays an appalling misprioritization of wealth, health, and values. Given the nauseating state of factory farming, there is a deep cognitive

dissonance in countries like American about the treatment of sentient, non-human animals. While I believe factory faming should be eliminated, there is virtually no “care” wasted on feed-animals because of their abysmal conditions, thus the resources squandered on mass meat production would only be addressed by green bioethics through elimination of animal products in health care facilities and cafeterias. See, for instance Elizabeth Bennett, “Obstacles in Legally Protecting Farm Animals in the United States as Animal Rights Abuses and Environmental Degradation Continue,”Revista Brasileira de Direito Animal 5, no. 7 (2014): 105-137.

478 _{Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation (San Francisco: Harpers Collins, 1991), 138.}

479 _{Even if we did “merely” bring all the poor into a higher standard of health care, while continuing to}

offer elective treatments to the developed world, it is likely the rich would never be satisfied with their own standard of living. They would perpetually want to be “ahead” and would not be content with equal access to health care, always searching for more elective procedures. This compulsion could be dubbed “sin” or “greed.” The “the Aristotelian concept of pleonexia (the ‘insatiable desire for more’)” would be a fitting label as well. See Tim Jackson, “Live Better by Consuming Less: Is There a ‘Double Dividend’ in Sustainable Consumption?.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 9, no. 1-2 (2005): 19-36, at 20.

The final section of this chapter first describes conservationist strategies currently in use in the medical industry. I look at the expanding field of telemedicine and

teleclinics, specifically. Then, I address lingering questions and concerns about distributive justice in health care. Telemedicine will again be used as an example, as concerns over privacy and accessibility are raised. Last, I provide suggestions for sustainability in health care for individuals, doctors, and institutions.

Policymakers should heed Willis Jenkins caution that “incremental policy improvements…seem to surrender criticisms of power structures and bad ideologies, thereby weaken possibilities for deeper cultural changes that the most challenging problems require.”480 Instead of ceding leverage to power structures by focusing on isolated, infinitesimally small changes, my suggestions are congruent with larger

environmental bioethics proposals, signifying that structural change is already underway. The examples in the next section highlight a “Technology as Liberator” model.481 As I mentioned in chapter one, green bioethics does not assume that controlling and reducing consumption alone is a solution to climate change. Green bioethics also has misgivings about the use of technology to reduce resource consumption because, for example, the harvesting of scarce trace minerals for computers and personal electronic devices can lead to conflict and human death, thus jeopardizing the common good. At the same time, green bioethics must show sympathy with other ecological efforts in order to build consensus in effective conservationist actions, even if there is disagreement on the

480 _{Willis Jenkins, The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity}

(Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013), 158.

481 _{Ian Barbour writes that current views on technology are positive, negative, or ambiguous. These views}

correlate to the three headings: “Technology as Liberator, Technology as Threat, and Technology as Instrument of Power.” Ian Barbour, Ethics in an Age of Technology (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 3.

best approach to conservation. I now explore two related strategies that uphold conservation and distributive justice: telemedicine and teleclinics.