Habilitation, Health, and Agency, Becker, Lawrence C.

The basic idea is that receiving and providing habilitation is a lifelong necessity for human beings, from their nearly helpless newborn state through their struggles to survive and thrive thereafter, even into the most severe diminishments of old age. This lifelong human necessity underlies all
questions about basic justice, and the possibilities for habilitation define the circumstances under which those questions arise.

Focusing on the circumstances of habilitation calls attention to the central role of physical and psychological health. Without basic good health in both domains, it is not possible to cope with the habilitative demands of ones physical and psychological endowments, and ones physical and social
environments. And for human beings, a particular aspect of human health effectively sums up these matters: namely human agency; the nature and extent of the ability to act effectively.