Thank you, Roy Head, for such an intriguing question.
When considering this question, I assume that most people would think of ‘health’ or ‘life’ insurance, rather than ‘car’, ‘fire’, ‘liability’, ‘property’, etc. Yet they are all insurances, and I intend to cover all of them in this Opinion.
Google defines insurance as “an arrangement by which a company or the state undertakes to provide a guarantee of compensation for specified loss, damage, illness, or death in return for the payment of a specified premium.” This definition may make sense for people living in some parts of the world, but it would make no sense for people living in other parts of the world. It depends on what you expect from the state, how you see the state, or, simply, how you see the world – ideologically, I mean…
In my home country (Turkey), it is a given that you can see a doctor as long as you have the General Health Insurance that is automatically provided by the state if you are a resident of Turkey. You would need to pay if you wanted see a better doctor in a private hospital, or if you wanted better conditions and relatively faster service, but it is nonetheless taken for granted that you get health insurance. Thus, in Turkey, if you ask people if it’s okay to repeal state health insurance, they would say that it’s not okay; it’s ‘wrong’ because that’s what the state needs to provide. The main premise here is that it is morally wrong if state authorities do not do what they are supposed to do, and so it is wrong to sell a fundamental human right to make a profit.
Of course, I have met many people who claim that we each need to work in order to pay for health insurance. In a country far away from my home country, there are millions of people who believe that it is socialism to provide health insurance for everyone, therefore it’s not good. For those people, it could well be justified to sell insurance, and insurance could be justified as long as you pay for it.
The main question is whether insurance is a human right. It is very straightforward when we talk about health or life insurance, as it’s a human right to stay alive, to be in good health, and to provide for your family. If so, then state insurance seems to be a moral obligation. If having a working car was also a fundamental human right, then the same thing would go for car insurance.
In a state where you can find paid health services, you could argue that it’s not fair to save some resources for the well-off and let the worse-off have the low-quality services. You could also argue that it is morally wrong to be a part of such an unfair distribution of health services. On the other hand, people often claim that it takes hard work to earn privilege. For them, it is your rightful privilege when you use first-class health resources through your expensive private insurance.
As I said, it depends on how one sees the world. I just have a feeling that 90% of the world would argue for the former.
What do you think? Is insurance moral? Let us know in the comments.
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I got my BA and MA degrees in Philosophy at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Currently I am a third year PhD student and a full-time research assistant in the same department. I am mostly interested in normative ethics with a special focus on rule-consequentialism. I am most amazed by David Hume's and Immanuel Kant's ideas; for me, these two philosophers dealt with many philosophically meaningful questions that are still relevant today.