Demythologising a neo-liberal model of healthcare reform: A politics of rights, recognition, and human suffering

As a moral-political witness to contemporary human suffering, the activist campaigning on various healthcare issues makes a vital contribution to the social expansion of a human rights consciousness. Particular incidents of citizen neglect are highlighted for their exemplary significance to a more general critique of economic and administrative processes of re-structuration, including international initiatives to marketise health. This actor attempts to invert a state politics of rationalised indifference by shifting the focus from the issue of procedure to that of patient harm. With a collective consciousness of suffering at the epicentre of their campaign, protest coalitions construct policies aimed at restricting public funding for essential services, for instance, as representative of an ‘embodied injustice’ against the sick and the vulnerable, and as an act of moral disrespect against the population at large. As this paper argues, discontent leads to a rediscovery of the practical significance of universal norms of social justice or equality, and of the need to actively partake in the project of democracy. The specific direction and orientation of this actor’s struggle for recognition within Irish society is centrally shaped by established traditions of reasoning and responding to social conflict. When combined with new macroeconomic priorities, such traditions not only restrict the realisation of autonomy and difference, but continue to reinforce a culture of profound non-accountability. The theoretical conception of justice and recognition applied to this study of social conflict on health will follow that tradition of thought established in particular by Axel Honneth (2003, 2007) in critical response to Nancy Fraser (2003).