ACHIEVING CONSENSUS
The health capability paradigm places special importance on the results and scientific basis of health policies. It promotes consensus on substantive – especially scientific – principles of distribution. Additionally, rather than using tools such as a strict majority vote amidst pluralism and wide disagreement, it promotes consensus through incompletely theorized agreements (ITAs) to make choices about which health services merit societal investment.
This approach to collective decision-making is not uniformly theorized at all levels. While incompletely theorized agreements value consensus on large philosophical questions, it also believes that agreement on these abstract political principles is less useful for legal purposes and ordinary politics. People rarely agree on all aspects and at all theoretical levels of a solution. Therefore, like lawyers and judges prioritize decisions of “what to do rather than exactly how to think,” health policy makers should employ this same method.
