The study of ethics in public health became a societal imperative following the horrors of pre World War II eugenics, the Holocaust, and the Tuskegee Experiment (and more recent similar travesties). International responses led to: the Nuremberg Doctors' Trials, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CCPCG, 1948...

In public health ethics, as in bioethics, utilitarian approaches usually prevail, followed by Kantian and communitarian foundations. If one considers the nature and core functions of public health, which are focused on a population perspective, utilitarianism seems still more applicable to public health ethics. Nevertheless, faulting additional protections towards the human person, utilitariani...

This paper defends a distinctly liberal approach to public health ethics and replies to possible objections. In particular, I look at a set of recent proposals aiming to revise and expand liberalism in light of public health's rationale and epidemiological findings. I argue that they fail to provide a sociologically informed version of liberalism. Instead, they rest on an implicit normative pre...

Public health programmes pose some very important ethical problems. One of the most pressing is the possible conflict between individual interests (and rights) and collective interests, which becomes particularly important in the public health surveillance setting. The present article first looks at the definitions of "public health surveillance" in a historical context and then identifies the ...

Genetics research has shown enormous developments in recent decades, although as yet with only limited clinical application. Bioethical analysis has been unable to deal with the vast problems of genetics because emphasis has been put on the principlism applied to both clinical and research bioethics. Genetics nevertheless poses its most complex moral dilemmas at the public level, where a social...

Public health as an organized discipline began more than 100 years ago to improve the health, primarily, of populations rather than of individuals. Given its population-based focus, however, public health is forever facing dilemmas concerning the appropriate extent of its reach and when the work of public health professionals is infringing on individual liberties in ethically troublesome ways. ...

As public health departments around the country undergo accreditation using the Public Health Accreditation Board standards, the process provides a new opportunity to integrate ethics metrics into day-to-day public health practice. While the accreditation standards do not explicitly address ethics, ethical tools and considerations can enrich the accreditation process by helping health departmen...

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 sourceboo...

Scientific progress is a significant basis for change in public-health policy and practice, but the field also invests in value-laden concepts and responds daily to sociopolitical, cultural and evaluative concerns. The concepts that drive much of public-health practice are shaped by the collective and individual mores that define social systems. This paper seeks to describe the ethics processes...