A moderate pluralist approach to public health policy and ethics

Public Health Ethics 2 (2):195-205 (2009)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, The Australian National University, LPO Box 8260, ANU, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia. Email: michael.selgelid{at}anu.edu.au ' + u + '@ ' + d + ' '/ /- ->. Home page: http: //www.cappe.edu.au/staff/michael-selgelid.htmThis article advocates the development of a moderate pluralist theory of political philosophy that recognizes that utility, liberty and equality are legitimate, independent social values and that none should have absolute priority over the others. Inter alia, such a theory would provide a principled means for striking a balance, or making trade-offs, between these values in cases of conflict. Recent developments in public health ethics have made progress in thinking about how to make trade-offs between liberty and utility in particular. While public health ethicists often claim that the least restrictive alternative should be used to achieve the public health goal in question, I argue that a plausible but under-recognized idea is that the least restrictive alternative might sometimes involve improvement of global health via redistributive taxation—i.e., rather than coercive social distancing measures. I conclude by demonstrating that the proportionality principle leaves open the question of when exactly utility outweighs liberty or vice versa—and I argue that, rather than speaking about the morality of liberty-infringing public health interventions in categorical/binary terms, it would be more fruitful and realistic to think and speak about the degree to which a liberty-infringing public health intervention is morally appropriate. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The Contemporary Significance of Confucianism.Tang Yijie & Yan Xin - 2008 - Frontiers of Philosophy in China 3 (4):477-501.
How Bad Is Rape?H. E. Baber - 1987 - Hypatia 2 (2):125-138.
The Hiddenness Argument Revisited.J. L. Schellenberg - 2005 - Religious Studies 41 (3):287-303.
Shifting Frames: From Divided to Distributed Psychologies of Scientific Agents.Peter J. Taylor - 1994 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1994:304-310.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-12-21

Downloads
106 (#152,073)

6 months
10 (#134,868)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Michael Selgelid
Monash University

References found in this work

Anarchy, State, and Utopia.Robert Nozick - 1974 - New York: Basic Books.
Taking rights seriously.Ronald Dworkin (ed.) - 1977 - London: Duckworth.
Political Liberalism.J. Rawls - 1995 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 57 (3):596-598.
Anarchy, State, and Utopia.Robert Nozick - 1974 - Philosophy 52 (199):102-105.
Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly.Norman Daniels - 2007 - Cambridge University Press.

View all 19 references / Add more references