Illegal Immigrants, Health Care, and Social Responsibility

In this paper I want to focus on the situation of illegal immigrants. I will discuss several different answers to the question about what ethical responsibility we have to provide health care to illegal immigrants. (I shall simply assume that societies have an ethical obligation to provide their own citizens with a reasonably comprehensive package of health benefits.) The answers that I shall discuss tend to conceptualize the ethical issues in terms of individual desert professional ethics or human rights. I want to discuss the limitations of each of these approaches and to offer an alternative. I shall approach the issues in terms of social responsibility and discuss the moral relevance of work. In doing so I tend to pull bioethics in the direction of social ethics and political philosophy. Thats the direction I think it should be heading. But before I begin the ethical discussion I need to say more about the phenomenon of illegal immigration. (excerpt)