"Morality is made for man, not man for morality."' I interpret this aphorism as suggesting that questions of morality can most fundamentally be addressed by considering human benefits and human harms -those benefits and harms to which our accepting various alternative moral principles would tend to lead. This formula is vague, but I shall be concerned in this paper with one attempt to state clearly at least a part of what is involved. I shall be examining issues of social justice in access to health care. Does justice, I shall ask, require that everyone be assured access to every kind of health care that can be expected to benefit him? If not, does it at least demand that everyone have equal access to health care, without regard to income or place of residence? Or does justice rather demand no more, and no less, than that everyone be assured a "decent minimum" of access to health care -and if that is so, how is it to be judged what constitutes that "decent minimum"? In many realms of life, no doubt, satisfactory ethical judgments can be made without careful analyses of the fundamental bases of these judgments. That is unlikely to be the case, however, with questions of health policy. When applied to those questions, whatever "moral good sense" we may develop in the ordinary course of life is likely to be inadequate. The effects of health policy are immensely complex, and so we cannot simply take in the nature and the effects of a set of policies at a glance and focus our moral good sense on them. It is, of course, difficult and often impossible to establish reliably what the effects of a proposed policy will be, but even when we can, it remains to be said which features of the policy and its effects are desirable, which are undesirable, and how the desirable and undesirable aspects balance from an ethical point of view. The effects of a policy will involve many people