AbstractEnvision a society in which all people have the ability to achieve the central health capabilities of avoiding premature death and escapable morbidity, and where everyone has comprehensive health insurance and access to high‐quality health care. This vision is the animating principle behind the health capability paradigm, a unique new approach where not just health care, or the right to health alone, but health and the capability for health itself are moral imperatives. Ruger has been developing this health capability paradigm for over 15 years. Her innovative approach bridges the gaps at the interdisciplinary intersection of ethics, economics, political science, law and human rights, with practical and theoretical applications for the financing and delivery of health care and public health. The health capability paradigm provides philosophical justification for the direct moral importance of health, health capability, and the right to health, as well as a theoretical basis for prioritizing needs and allocating resources. There are no guarantees of good health, but society can, if it will, design and build effective institutions and social systems, structures and practices, that support all citizens in the pursuit of central health capabilities. Key tenets of this theory, which emphasizes responsibility and choice for health, include health agency, shared health governance, incompletely theorized agreements, internalized public moral norms to guide social choice and collective action, and a joint scientific and deliberative approach to decision-making that incorporates medical necessity, medical appropriateness, and shortfall equality. This paradigm integrates both proceduralist and consequentialist approaches to justice, and emphasizes the critical roles of both moral and political legitimacy. We can no longer afford to ignore human suffering. This book weaves together a number of disparate constructs and original insights to produce a foundational new framework for thinking about and taking action to achieve health and social justice— the health capability paradigm.