The right to exit and skilled labour emigration: Ethical considerations for compulsory health service programmes.

Compulsory (health) service contracts have recently received considerable attention in the normative literature. The service contracts are considered and offered as a permissible and liberal alternative to emigration restrictions if individuals relinquish their right to exit via contract in exchange for the state-funded tertiary education. To that end, the recent normative literature on the service programmes has particularly focused on discussing the circumstances or conditions in which the contracts should be signed, so that they are morally binding on the part of the skilled workers. However, little attention is devoted to the relevance of the right to exit for the debate on compulsory service programmes. In this paper, I argue that even if the service contracts are voluntary, and thus the would-be medical students voluntarily relinquish their right to exit, the reasons behind the right should be taken into account for the contracts to be morally valid. A clear understanding of the right to exit is a must in order not to breach its basic components and for the service contracts to be morally binding. To that end, I provide two accounts of the reasons to value the right to exit by presenting Patti Lenard's discussion of the right to exit and by reconstructing James Griffin's account of human rights. I conclude by offering brief ethical considerations for compulsory health service programmes grounded in the reasons to value the right to exit.

Health Without Care? Vulnerability, Medical Brain Drain, and Health Worker Responsibilities in Underserved Contexts.

There is a consensus that the effects of medical brain drain, especially in the Sub-Saharan African countries, ought to be perceived as more than a simple misfortune. Temporary restrictions on the emigration of health workers from the region is one of the already existing policy measures to tackle the issue-while such a restrictive measure brings about the need for quite a justificatory work. A recent normative contribution to the debate by Gillian Brock provides a fruitful starting point. In the first step of her defence of emigration restrictions, Brock provides three reasons why skilled workers themselves would hold responsibilities to assist with respect to vital needs of their compatriots. These are fair reciprocity, duty to support vital institutions, and attending to the unintended harmful consequences of one's actions. While the first two are explained and also largely discussed in the literature, the third requires an explication on how and on which basis skilled workers would have a responsibility as such. In this article, I offer a vulnerability approach with its dependency aspect that may account for why the health workers in underserved contexts would have a responsibility to attend to the unintended side effects of their actions that may lead to a vital risk of harm for the population. I discuss HIV/AIDS care in Zimbabwe as a case in point in order to show that local health workers may have responsibilities to assist the population who are vulnerable to their mobility.

Against Cursory Treatments in Ethics of Medical Migration from Underserved Countries.

In a recent paper, Mpofu, Sen Gupta, and Hays (2016) attempt to outline the obligations of recruiting high-income countries (HICs) and would-be emigrant health workers (HWs) to tackle the effects of mass exodus of health workers from underserved regions. They reconstruct (i) Rawlsian and Kantian global justice approaches to argue for moral obligations of HICs and (ii) an individual justice approach to point to non-enforceable social responsibilities of HWs to assist their compatriots. This critical commentary demonstrates that the argumentation within their individual justice approach is problematic on the basis of three reasons: (1) their discussion under-theorizes and undervalues individual rights and more specifically the right to exit, (2) their argumentation in the latter part, even if problematically, does rather point to moral obligations in lieu of social responsibilities of HWs, and (3) they overlook many other important freedoms, interests, and values pertinent to the issue of retention.