The Injustice of Child Mortality

Over the last three decades, a large amount of scholarly work—cutting across disciplines such as demography, medical sciences, nutrition, history, and economics—has grappled with issues related to child mortality. Child mortality became a specifi c focus in the literature of human development as it was considered not only a measure of child health, but also an important indicator of overall development in the area of health. A Shot of Justice: Priority-Setting for Addressing Child Mortality by Ali Mehdi attempts to understand issues such as child mortality and child health through the lens of political philosophy. Mehdi lays out a very ambitious canvas on which he tries to present the problem of child mortality as a problem of justice. He argues that, although millions of children die every year for avoidable reasons, this has not been seen as a problem of injustice, and few theorists of justice have grappled with the problem of justice towards children.

An Injustice to Children