This chapter addresses three questions about health systems: What is a health system? What are health systems for? What functions should a health system perform? A health system can be understood as an interconnected set of structural relationships between two components: a population and a set of providers. A health system includes the resources, actors and institutions related to the financing, regulation and provision of activities, whose primary intent is to improve or maintain health. Health systems include personal health services, hybrid health services and population health services. The defining purpose of the health system is to improve health, both the average level and its distribution across individuals. Two other intrinsic goals of the health system should be responsiveness to the legitimate expectations of the population, and fairness in financial contribution. Health systems must perform five basic functions: financing, provision, resource development, systemic integration and the meta-function of stewardship.

This chapter explores why and how health should be measured at the population level. It introduces generic health measures – such as disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and health-adjusted life expectancy – as tools to quantify overall health, enabling comparison across diseases, populations and time. We highlight conceptual and methodological challenges in health measurement, including how to define health boundaries and how to weight and compare different health states and conditions. The topics discussed include performance vs. capacity, observed vs. reported measures and the valuation of future vs. present health outcomes. The chapter also discusses ethical concerns around using health metrics for priority setting, particularly at the population level. Recent developments in this field have focused on ethical considerations around fairness and equity, and on how to better incorporate broader determinants of health into current measures of population health.

A cherished common law notion is equality before the law. This notion has shaped and defined Australian laws, and is important to law’s capacity to produce justice because it requires that everyone is treated the same before the law. However, equality before the law has not produced effective social justice and equality in Australia: demographic and socio-economic indicators consistently paint a picture of broad social inequality and a growing poverty gap – rather than one of an egalitarian society in which everyone achieves the same justice. This chapter explores how Australian laws work with the idea of equality to help explain why certain groups continue to be disadvantaged in their access to justice and the legal system. It provides a window onto different perspectives and experiences of Australian laws, which we encourage you to reflect upon throughout your legal studies.

Air pollution has been identified as the single largest environmental health risk by the World Health Organisation. Existing legal instruments are inadequate to respond to the scale of the challenge. The question of how to design more efficient, as well as more just, legal systems is becoming increasingly pressing. The essay identifies three sets of ethical conundrums that decision-makers must confront when regulating air pollution – related to why govern, how to govern, and where to govern. It uses the planetary boundary framework that identifies the processes that regulate the stability of the Earth system, as a conceptual lens, to explore the ethical implications behind the motivations driving air quality governance, the framing of a complex environmental problem and the global governance of localized impacts. In doing so, the essay reflects on how the design of more ethically oriented legal systems can enhance environmental law’s response to planetary problems.

Bringing light to AI-related harms is key to redressing them and to enable prevention. Meta-analyses of risks can also bring to light when harms were detected and by whom, leading us to better practices for prevention and detection.

Undesirable bias is a well-known issue in algorithmic decision-making. This chapter explores how fairness is defined and whether it can be studied quantitively, and explores several debiasing frameworks from the literature.

The central idea of this chapter is value pluralism. This third possibility assumes that multiple co-existing economic systems, forms of economic growth, and models of human development will persist into the future. Within this pluralistic approach, I emphasize three interconnected goals: alleviating poverty, more fairly distributing prosperity, and enabling the pursuit and achievement of human capabilities. This possibility aims to mitigate the worst effects of capitalism, harvest the benefits of prosperity, and distribute wealth in ways that are meaningful to people’s lives. I argue that these three goals should be at the forefront of creating the world of tomorrow.

Lives are comprised of the stories we tell. At the beginning of this chapter, I argue for the importance of understanding how narratives not only mirror but also shape our understanding of ourselves and others. I draw on classic and contemporary research in social and cultural psychology to show how narratives are remembered and transformed over time and between people. I also discuss master narratives – dominant stories that help create shared understanding and cohesion in societies. I then introduce two dominant master narratives concerning economic development. The first highlights growing inequality and its detrimental impact on societies. The second emphasizes that, despite the vices of capitalism, economic growth has led to increased prosperity. I situate these narratives in the contemporary political and academic zeitgeist, where inequality dominates. I end the chapter by discussing the moral imperative to alleviate global poverty, create fairer societies, and pursue human capabilities as a guide for rethinking economic development.

I provide an overview of the book in this introductory chapter. The scope, limits, and style of the book are outlined. I introduce a central tension: that humanity has never been so prosperous, yet it often feels to many of us as though we never have enough. The view from manywheres is a central organizing principle in the book. The idea is to stay on the move between multiple disciplines, methods, and perspectives to comprehensively understand economic inequality. From this holistic view, I articulate a new vision for economic development – one based on the alleviation of poverty, the creation of fairness in our shared economic systems, and the pursuit and achievement of human capabilities.

I present a case study in this chapter to illustrate the importance of moral psychology, fairness, and relative deprivation. There was little civic discontent in Ireland when the economy collapsed but, when Ireland had the fastest-growing economy in Europe, people took to the streets and ultimately voted the sitting government out of power. I detail a series of studies, mostly using ethnographic and qualitative methods, that revealed some of the historically ingrained cultural and moral reasons why Irish people passively accepted economic hardship and austerity during the downturn, only to protest en masse when the government introduced a bill charging citizens directly for the water they consumed. The water charge served as a symbol of injustice, and people took to the streets because they felt unfairly treated and deprived relative to others who were seen as benefitting during the economic upturn. It is not objective economic indicators, but rather people’s subjective understandings of these systems, that determine whether they are seen as fair.

This chapter investigates the global access to justice crisis, where approximately 1.4 billion people worldwide have unmet civil or administrative justice needs despite living in functioning legal systems. Through an analysis of data from multiple countries including across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, the chapter demonstrates that individuals with legal problems often struggle to access adequate assistance. Unrepresented litigants face substantial disadvantages without legal support, including, losing custody of children, facing eviction, and experiencing asset seizure.

Four factors are exacerbating this crisis: growing societal complexity, which creates increasingly intricate legal procedures; overprofessionalization of the legal community; systemic bias favoring institutional plaintiffs; and the fundamental language gap separating laypeople from lawyers. Addressing this crisis is imperative for two primary reasons: fairness and social costs. The chapter proposes that legal AI systems represent public goods, similar to courts and schools, requiring coordinated investment to democratize access to justice.

Trust is presented as a cornerstone of human–AI interaction. The chapter reviews psychological, sociological, and computational models of trust, including interpersonal and contractual trust, Luhmann’s theory of trust-as-prediction, and the Computers Are Social Actors theory that explains why people anthropomorphize machines. It examines risks of overtrust (automation bias, misplaced confidence) and undertrust (algorithm aversion, underuse of reliable systems). Strategies such as transparency, explainability, fairness, and accountability are discussed as ways to calibrate trust appropriately. The chapter concludes that trust in AI is dynamic, context-dependent, and must be designed into systems deliberately.

Narcissism has garnered a great deal of attention in the early twenty-first century. Because sociology has dominated much thinking in criminology, personality styles including narcissism have not received as much attention. Analysts can conceive of narcissism more broadly and, in doing so, attempt to explain the various forms of unfairness that take the form of crimes.