Health Research Funders and Justice: Obligations to Coordinate and Counterbalance

Government health research funders are frequently criticized on the grounds that their distribution of resources fails to reflect a population's disease burden. These critiques do not take into account what other research funders are doing. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake. Both governmental and non-profit research funders ought to be aiming for a just distribution of overall research resources. Individual funders faced with the non-compliance of other funders therefore have two ethical obligations. First, an obligation to coordinate: each ought to share information about its funding allocations, to actively coordinate its activities with other funders, and to encourage other funders to do as they should. Second, an obligation to counterbalance: where an individual funder expects continuing non-compliance by other funders, it should skew its own funding so as to compensate for the shortfall as far as it can.