Incentives for Global Public Health: Patent Law and Access to Essential Medicines

Connecting International Law with Public Law

by Thomas W. Pogge (Editor), Matthew Rimmer (Editor), Kim Rubenstein (Editor)

This portrait of the global debate over patent law and access to essential medicines focuses on public health concerns about HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, the SARS virus, influenza, and diseases of poverty. The essays explore the diplomatic negotiations and disputes in key international fora, such as the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization. Drawing upon international trade law, innovation policy, intellectual property law, health law, human rights and philosophy, the authors seek to canvass policy solutions which encourage and reward worthwhile pharmaceutical innovation while ensuring affordable access to advanced medicines. A number of creative policy options are critically assessed, including the development of a Health Impact Fund, prizes for medical innovation, the use of patent pools, open-source drug development and forms of 'creative capitalism'.

536 pages, Hardcover

First published June 24, 2010

About the author

Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge is a German philosopher and currently Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University and Research Director at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University with a dissertation supervised by John Rawls. Pogge serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs journal, Ethics & International Affairs, and is an Ethics and Debt Project participant.

Pogge has written extensively on political philosophy, especially on Rawls, Immanuel Kant, cosmopolitanism, and, more recently, extreme poverty. His book World Poverty and Human Rights is widely regarded as one of the most important works on global justice. Pogge's work has been, along with that of Charles Beitz, one of the most important in the "first wave" of work on global justice. Yet what makes Pogge's contribution to the debate on global justice and the eradication of world poverty original is his emphasis on negative duties rather than on the positive duties stressed by Beitz. According to Pogge, the global rich have a stringent duty of justice to take decisive steps toward the eradication of global poverty primarily because they have violated the negative duty not to contribute to the imposition of a global institutional order that foreseeably and avoidably renders the basic socioeconomic rights of other human beings unfulfilled, and not because they must honor a positive duty to help others in need when they can at little cost to themselves. Recently, Pogge's argument has been aggressively critiqued by Joshua Cohen