Can Norman Daniels Help You Get a Wheelchair? A Commentary on Durocher et al.

Durocher and colleagues (2019) argue that Norman Daniels’s notion of just health could provide a useful framework for decreasing inequities in access to assistive technology. I argue that it would provide limited help for two reasons. First, Daniels’s reliance on normal species functioning as the goal of health care and his assumptions regarding the impact of normal species functioning on reasonable life projects create substantial difficulties for application to assistive technology. Second, although Daniels’s requirements for distributive justice provide a critical starting point for any discussion of health equity, these requirements appear already met within current assistive technology funding schemes.