Ethics in epidemiology and public health I. Technical terms.

Ethics in epidemiology and public health has emerged from several sources: most obvious is the discipline of bioethics, with its theories, methods, case studies, and familiar textbooks. Bioethics has primarily been focused upon medical ethics and research ethics and only recently has turned its attention to public health. Another source of scholarship is philosophical ethics. Here the sourcebooks are the writings of Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Rawls, and many others, the so called “high ground” philosophers of the past 2000 years. Philosophical ethics provides a rich lode from which to mine theories and concepts and to observe intellectual trends. A third source for ethics in epidemiology and public health is closer to home and is not so closely connected to bioethics nor philosophical ethics. Public health practitioners and scholars have written about the ethical problems that underlie professional practice. Advocacy, coercion, and scientific misconduct are a few representative examples, but there are many others, including privacy, conflicts of interest, and the rights of vulnerable communities. Given the scope and connectedness of these sources, a vast number of words and phrases could be included in a glossary on ethics in epidemiology and public health. To organise what could be a very long list, we identify two categories of terms. There are the more technical terms of ethics, such as casuistry, communitarian ethics, obligations, and virtues. These we define below in the first installment of the glossary. There are also more applied terms— equipoise, informed consent, privacy and the precautionary principle—representing important practical issues with significant ethical content. These will appear in a second installment. As the discipline of public health ethics matures, we expect to see many other terms surface. More importantly, we hope to see more scholarly discussions of ethical issues.