It brings in the perspective of the rich and the more fortunate. Thus moderate principalism based on nonmaleficence says that we cannot harm people by taking away their money or their better “fortunes.” In the same way Autonomy can view the issue and say people have a choice in the matter, thus they can choose not to contribute to the health care cost burdens. But in regards to Autonomy, we can take a Kantian perspective and have autonomy say “Yes” to health care because we would be helping people be fully autonomous by helping them stay healthy.
And in addressing the issue raised by Autonomy and nonmaleficence, Justice can say that we can distribute benefits and the burdens of such a program equally with all involved, thus agreeing with the Rawlsian principles of distributed justice and equality of opportunity. But Robert Nozick raises the question, what gives us the right to take away people's hard earned money? Thus raising the strongest objection to Health Care by raising the issue of justice against itself by saying it is simply unjust to take people's earned money away for something they do not want to do. So to decide upon the right course of action, we will have to resort to using our moral intuitions. One good example is the drowning child scenario to see how intuition sees the problem.
In the scenario, if we walk by a child drowning in a shallow pond, most of the people will immediately take the time to save the child if they can. The intuition to reach out and help the child can be applied to the matter to Health Care. But then again, there will always be those people who do not help the child because they are too lazy or do not want to dirty their clothes. But intuition clearly says that we must help, if we will help that child, why not help the millions who have suffered with no health care? So we must use intuition to decide which principal of Moderate Principalism is more important and then apply them, as in the case of the drowning child scenario.
Another scenario is how we deal with disaster relief; we do not worry about the trivial matters since saving lives (beneficence) comes as a first priority in any relief operation. In the same way, Moderate Principalism argues that we have an obligation to provide everyone with an adequate level of care, to facilitate a reasonably full and satisfying life without the imposition of excessive burdens.
But to address the concerns raised by the President's commission and the Moderate Principalism, Norman Daniels raises an important perspective on Health Care. He says that society has a normal opportunity range for each individual and each individual's share in the normal range is determined by their talents and skills. Thus an impairment of normal functions restrict a individual's share in the normal opportunity range so every health need is a deviation from species typical (normal) functioning of the organism. Thereby, on the basis of choices in the opportunity, equality of opportunity trumps any right to differential economic advantage. It is the same principal as the rights to education; we value equality of opportunity over rights to differential economic advantages.
So justice requires that everyone have equality of opportunity to make the most of their talents and skills. And thus, Justice requires everyone have access to Health Care that restores them to or close to their normal functioning and/or of their normal opportunity range. Thus, Norman Daniels argues that just like the concept of Equality of Opportunity or the Rights to Education, everyone has a right to Health Care and it is up to the society to make sure they are functioning normally as individuals. However, Daniels is also careful in pointing out that going beyond your normal functioning range, meaning “enhancements” that you do are not included in the health care because you are trying to are doing a procedure to restore a normal functioning range that you “lost” but rather trying to enhance a already typical functioning range.
This philosophy is based on the Rawlsian principle of fair quality of Opportunity, where a person has no unfair advantage due to socioeconomic position or any other factors and all aspects of society, power, post or officers are attainable by the individual without any restrictions. This means that we give everyone a chance to succeed and make something out of them, but the outcome does not matter because we are only asking for the opportunity for the people to make a difference. But that opportunity cannot be utilized or used if the person is sick, so Normal Daniel's argument says that society must do what it can to restore the person to normal functioning.
