STANFORD ENCYCLOPAEDIA.

Public Health Ethics

First published Mon Apr 12, 2010

At its core, public health is concerned with promoting and protecting the health of
populations, broadly understood. For example, the Institute of Medicine defines
public health as what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the conditions in
which people can be healthy (IOM 1988). Often, but not exclusively, collective
interventions in service of population health involve or require government action.
In the United States, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the
Consumer Protection Agency are in part or in whole public health agencies. All
states and most municipalities or counties have health departments whose various
functions include everything from the inspection of commercial food service to the
collection and use of epidemiological data for population surveillance of disease.
Collective action to promote and protect population health also occurs at the global
level, as exemplified by the activities of the World Health Organization.
One view of public health ethics regards the moral foundation of public health as
an injunction to maximize welfare, and therefore health as a component of welfare
(Powers & Faden 2006). This view frames the core moral challenge of public
health as balancing individual liberties with the advancement of good health
outcomes. Consider, for example, how liberties are treated in government policies
that fluoridate municipal drinking water or compel people with active, infectious
tuberculosis to be treated.
An alternative view of public health ethics characterizes the fundamental
problematic of public health ethics differently: what lies at the moral foundation of
public health is social justice. While balancing individuals' liberties with promoting
social goods is one area of concern, it is embedded within a broader commitment
to secure a sufficient level of health for all and to narrow unjust inequalities
(Powers & Faden, 2006).[1] Thus, another important area of concern is the
balancing of this commitment with the injunction to maximize good aggregate or
collective health outcomes. Understood this way, public health ethics has deep
moral connections to broader questions of social justice, poverty, and systematic
disadvantage.
Within this general framework, this paper proceeds as follows: Section 1 lays out
some of the distinctive challenges of public health ethics. Section 2 discusses
different justifications for public health interventions, including the role of
paternalism, its various interpretations and how these bear on the permissibility of
public health interventions. Also discussed in Section 2 are broader questions of
democratic legitimacy. Section 3 focuses on questions of justice and fairness in

public health ethics. Finally, Section 4 surveys six broad areas of global justice
concern that deserve further attention from a public health ethics point of view.
Overall, this entry strives to provide a general lay of the land with regards to the
central issues that drive public health ethics, as well as a more in-depth discussion
of justice, fairness, and priority setting in public health.
1. Distinctive Challenges of Public Health Ethics
2. Justifying Public Health Programs and Policies
o 2.1 Overall Benefit
o 2.2 Collective Action/Efficiency
o 2.3 Communitarianism
o 2.4 Fairness in the Distribution of Burdens
o 2.5 The Harm Principle
o 2.6 Paternalism
o 2.7 Liberty-limiting Continua and A Central Task of Public Health
Ethics
3. Justice and Fairness in Public Health
4. Global Justice
o 4.1 Research In but not For the Developing World
o 4.2 Uneven Research Focus
o 4.3 Undue (Health-Related) Burdens Imposed by a Shared World
Order
o 4.4 Compensatory Claims
o 4.5 Positive Duties Across Borders
o 4.6 Mutual Benefit
Bibliography
Other Internet Resources

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1. Distinctive Challenges of Public Health Ethics

There is no standard way of organizing the ethics of clinical practice, public health
and biomedical science. Although these distinctive concerns are often captured
under the umbrella term of bioethics, sometimes bioethics is presented as the
equivalent of medical ethics or in contrast to public health or population-level
bioethics. Whichever approach is preferred, a key question remains: what
distinguishes public health ethics from medical ethics? The answer lies in the
distinctive nature of public health. Public health has four characteristics that
provide much of the subject matter for public health ethics: (1) it is a public or
collective good; (2) its promotion involves a particular focus on prevention; (3) its
promotion often entails government action; and (4) it involves an intrinsic
outcome-orientation.
First, in public health the object of concern is populations, not individuals. Public
health is, by its very nature, a public, communal good, where the benefits to one
person cannot readily be individuated from those to another, though its burdens and
benefits often appear to fall unevenly on different sub-groups of the population.
This raises a particular set of justificatory challenges public health ethics has to
address: who is public health good for? Whose health are we concerned with, and
what sacrifices is it acceptable to ask of individuals in order to achieve it? Is there a
difference between public health and population health? And why is public health a
good worth promoting? Any answer to these questions has to take account of the
fact that public health measures are often based on the prospect of benefit to
individuals, not immediately securable benefits.
Second, promoting public health involves a high degree of commitment to the
prevention of disease and injury. However, although much of the discussion
surrounding public health focuses primarily on this preventive aspect, public health
agencies and services also involve diagnosing and treating illnesses, with all the
attendant clinical services that those activities require. Indeed, increasingly
national health systems are understood to include both preventive functions and the
delivery of personal medical services. Often, these functions and services are
integrated under a common political or administrative structure. Depending on the
specific context in which population health is to be improved, separating public
health services and functions from personal medical care services and functions
may or may not make sense. That said, policies and programs whose aim is to
prevent illness and injury are paradigmatically the territory of public health.
Certainly, no other social institution is generally recognized as so clearly having
this remit.

Public health's commitment to prevention carries with it particular moral

challenges. Eliminating or mitigating a harm that already exists can be viewed as
being of greater moral importance than preventing that harm from materializing.
Insofar as this view is incorporated into health policy, public health interventions
that focus on prevention can receive less funding and public support than medical
treatments. For example, both policy makers and the public tend to place a higher
priority on ensuring that heart patients have access to surgery and medications than
on programs to prevent heart disease through diet and exercise. Moreover, although
the costs and burdens of preventive interventions occur largely in the present, the
benefits of successful preventive interventions occur in the future, and usually only
to some members of the population whose identities cannot be predicted in
advance and whose numbers can only be estimated probabilistically. Thus,
prevention policies and programs raise questions about how we should think about
statistical and unidentified lives and persons, and whether health gains in the future
should be treated as worth less than health gains in the present. In some cases, the
beneficiaries of prevention interventions are members of future generations,
complicating the moral picture even further.
Third, as noted previously, achieving good public health results frequently requires
government action: many public health measures are coercive or are otherwise
backed by the force of law. Public health is focused on regulation and public
policy, and relies less often on individual actions and services. In this as in all other
areas of official state action, we therefore have to address tensions among justice,
security, and the scope of legal restrictions and regulations. This adds to the
peculiarity of the justificatory questions surrounding public health: the exercise of
public authority and the imposition of public sanctions and penalties in an area as
deeply personal as an individual's health choices require strong justification. The
same questions of trade-off between personal freedom and collective action that
arise in the political arena thus arise for public health. It is in this context that
concerns about paternalism typically emerge.
Fourth, public health has a definite consequentialist orientation. Promoting public
health means seeking to advance good health outcomes and, usually more
pressingly, to avoid bad health outcomes. As noted at the outset of this essay, in
some discussions of public health ethics, this outcome-orientation is viewed as the
moral justification and foundation of public health and, as with all consequentialist
schemes, is presented as needing to be constrained by attention to deontological
concerns such as rights, and by attention to justice-related concerns such as the fair
distribution of burdens (Childress et al. 2002; Kass 2001) . While public health
ethics has to engage with the traditional problems raised by its consequentialist
commitments, for those who view social justice as the moral foundation of public
health, considerations of justice provide the frame within which the moral
implications of public health's consequentialist orientation are addressed.

These four distinctive features provide public health ethics with its basic structure
and orientation. Under the first rubric, important questions arise with regard to the
scope of public health: who is the public? The usual assumption is that the public
is a discrete unit that corresponds with state boundaries: one single country's
population. But in a global world, that assumption is not always plausible for a
variety of reasons. Communicable diseases have a way of ignoring state
boundaries, and prevention measures in one country may be futile if other
countries do not follow suit. Moreover, the statist focus is not always readily
justifiable: insofar as diseases cross borders, should public health interventions do
the same? Further questions about justice and equity across borders also arise: do
wealthier countries have obligations to attend to the public health of less fortunate
others? These issues, as well as questions of priority setting in public health, will
be discussed further in section IV below.
Depending on the particular health challenge we are concerned with, the public in
question can be more local or more global than a single country's population.
National boundaries are relevant because policies and regulations are usually set by
individual countries, and vary from country to country. They are also relevant for
reasons having to do with government control: countries report their data about
communicable disease outbreaks, burden of disease, and other health indicators to
global institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO) on a voluntary
basis. Although International Health Regulations to which 194 countries are
signatories provide an international structure for global public health, as with much
international law and regulation, enforcement mechanisms are weak. It is not clear
what the moral implications of these practical limitations should be for public
health. The structure of the problem is similar to environmental challenges such as
air pollution and global warming: determinants of ill health are not restricted by
national boundaries, and we are all ultimately connected to each other's health
status, at least in some ways. But more importantly, citizens in the developed world
are arguably causally connected to some health deprivations in the developing
world, for example by upholding restrictions on the production and distribution of
generics that hinder the containment of easily treatable diseases in poor countries
(Pogge 2002). This gives public health, and therefore public health ethics, a unique
and very interesting location vis--vis discussions of global justice, our duties to
the distant poor, and the need for global cooperation to address common problems
(Holland 2007).
Another issue that comes up in this connection is the following: are public and
population interchangeable terms to designate the entity whose health we are
concerned with? Is there a significant conceptual difference, a difference in moral
valence, or a difference in attitude and orientation between public health ethics on
the one hand, and population-level health ethics on the other? The literature
presents three general ways of denoting the object of public health: community, the
public, and populations. In one sense, the most morally laden manner of
designating those who are subject to, and benefit from, public health measures, is

to think about them as a community (Beauchamp & Steinbock 1999). Reference to

community implies a uniform group, usually with a shared language, culture,
history, and geographical location. Characterizing the concern of public health as
being the health of the community renders more natural (and possibly more
plausible) appeal to the common good as a way of justifying public health
interventions. Reference to the public shares some of those same features but
tends to be less morally laden. This is in part because the public is somewhat
more anonymous than the community and does not necessarily signal a tight
cultural connection. Rather, it connotes a relatively discrete unit with some
common institutions and usually a shared political life. Thus, references to the
public as well as to the community may encourage the perception that the good we
are seeking to advance is that of a geographically bounded unit, with community
connoting stronger cultural associations, and public connoting some kind of
official political unit such as a state or a country.
Characterizing the health we are trying to advance as that of populations, by
contrast, may minimize the implication that special shared features or
characteristics are needed in order for a group of individuals to constitute a
collective unit whose health can be of concern. Because of that, it may lend itself
more readily to an internationalist, less inward-looking orientation: any population,
regardless of nationality or geographic location, has health interests that ought to
be attended to and advanced (Wikler & Brock 2007). Populations can be more
local or more global than a community or the public. This way of speaking also
may dilute the emphasis on national borders as a way of delineating the scope of
concern, and provides more flexibility in the object of concern for public health. In
much the same way, discussion of global health, as opposed to international health,
is seen as helpful in emphasizing a focus on the health needs of all, as opposed to a
focus on international cooperation and the health needs of peoples in countries
other than one's own.
This is not, of course, to say that those who prefer the term public health to
population health do not share a global orientation. Indeed, the World Health
Organization is generally referred to as a global public health institution, and those
who work to promote health transnationally are referred to as public health and not
population health professionals. Indeed, although some see a substantive
conceptual divergence in ways of thinking about whose health is to be protected
and promoted, others see no conflict, at least between the concepts of public health
and population health. For example, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics uses the
term population health to refer to the collective state of health of members of a
population and the term public health to refer to efforts made to improve the
political, regulatory and economic environments that affect prospects for health. So
understood, the object of public health is the improvement of population health
(Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2007, p. XV).

Another conceptual challenge central to public health ethics is how to think about
public health or population health as a public good. Is the health of the public or of
a population a good in its own right, or can it meaningfully be understood only as
an aggregation of the welfare interests secured for each individual that comprises
the population? Is public health a good that nations and global institutions can
rightly seek with the same justificatory structures and limitations with which they
seek national security and world peace, or is it somehow a more limited or
different kind of political construct?
Common to the second, third and fourth features of public health is the question of
how broadly or narrowly to understand what public health entails (Powers & Faden
2006). Given a widening understanding of health and the factors affecting
prospects for population health, public health can be viewed as being so expansive
as to have no meaningful institutional, disciplinary or social boundaries.
Everything from crime, war and natural disasters; to population genetics,
environmental hazards, marketing and other corporate practices; to political
oppression, income inequality and individual behavior has been claimed under the
rubric of public health. Part of what makes each of these diverse things of concern
is their impact on health, and in that sense they are all public health problems. A
central role of public health, grounded in social justice, is to bring attention to all
aspects of the social or natural world that exert a significant impact on the
preservation or promotion of health, and not only those that can be effected
through traditional public health measures or means.
At the same time, however, health is only one dimension of human well-being.
Calling attention to the devastating impact on the health of women of Taliban rule
is important, but it should not be confused with reducing the injustices of the
oppression of women to its health effects. The assault of such oppression on
personal security, self-determination and respect is of independent moral concern.
Similarly, while reducing violence is critical to population health, that does not
mean that law enforcement, the criminal justice system, diplomacy and
international relations should be considered tools of public health. Because so
many of the determinants of the different dimensions of well-being overlap and
reinforce one another, it is not surprising that different social institutions and
professional communities share common concerns and priorities, nor should it be
expected that public policies rest on only one moral consideration like health or
security.
The flip side of this observation is that public health has an obligation to evaluate
the impact of its policies and practices on human well-being broadly, and not only
on health. Guaranteed access to basic health services can improve health, but just
as importantly, it can provide people with a sense of social worth and eliminate the
insecurity of being unable to provide for loved ones in times of crisis. Similarly,
screening programs for sexually transmitted infections may improve health but,
depending on features of the programs and the contexts in which they are

implemented, they may result in social disrespect, decreased personal security and
constraints on personal behavior.
The overlapping of effects and justifications is particularly clear in prevention.
Immunization, water fluoridation, anti-smoking campaigns and motorcycle helmet
laws are all paradigmatic preventive public health interventions. At the same time,
however, interventions generally outside the purview of public health institutions
and professionals such as early childhood education, income supports, literacy
initiatives for girls and safe housing programs all can be effective in preventing
illness and injury. In some cases, such interventions may be more effective and
efficient in achieving health gains than paradigmatic public health programs.
Morally responsible public health policy requires attentiveness to the multiple
determinants of health. This requirement does not signal that public health has no
boundaries. Rather, public health has a unique relationship of stewardship to one
dimension of well-being, health, and to the particular determinants that have a
special strategic significance for health. Some of those determinants are the classic
focus of public health such as infectious disease control and the securing of safe
food, water, and essential medications. However, exercising that stewardship
requires responsiveness to the best available evidence about all the determinants,
across the landscape of an interconnected social structure, that have a special
strategic relation to health, including those outside the conventional remits of
public health agencies and authorities. Policies governing education, foreign
assistance, agriculture, and the environment can all have significant impact on
health, just as health policies can have impact on international relations and
national and global economies. Providing public health arguments in defense of
particular environmental or educational policies, and recognizing that such policies
can have profound effects on health, simply recognizes the complex interweaving
of the multiple dimensions of human welfare.
One worry raised by this interconnectedness across spheres of social life and policy
is that classifying something as a public health matter could be an effective way of
taking it out of the realm of legitimate discussion. If the goal of protecting health is
seen as clearly good, government actions aimed at securing health may be less
scrutinized than actions aimed at more controversial ends, leaving public health
officials with too much power and too little democratic accountability. As a
practical matter, however, these concerns may not be realistic. Although data on
this point are hard to come by, it is likely that the reverse is true: public health
agencies and workers are more likely to have insufficient political power, authority
and resources at their disposal to achieve important and pressing goals than to
wield too much. It is not usually individuals' civil rights to which public health
interventions stand in opposition, but rather private, corporate economic interests
such as the tobacco industry, the meat and dairy industry, and so on. Nonetheless, it
is worth raising these worries at least to keep them in view as a possible issue for
public health ethics to address.

Even if the worry that expanding the classification of something as a public health
matter in some way threatens civil liberties is nothing more than fear-mongering,
the breadth of what falls under public health may raise concerns about democratic
legitimacy. Insofar as health authorities have a public mandate to advance health, is
it therefore appropriate for them to hue to strict guidelines as to what they can
undertake in the name of public health based, at least in part, on the expressed or
revealed preferences or values of those within their reach? Under what conditions
are measures such as public health surveillance and the banning of certain food
materials properly considered to be overreaching by public health authorities, and
therefore to constitute a lack of adherence to their democratically-given mandate?
Public health ethics has to give serious consideration to the question: how exactly
should the mandate of public health authorities be specified such that they do not
run afoul of the requirements of legitimacy in a democratic political system?
Particularly when government institutions are charged with promoting population
health, a task of public health ethics is determining self-imposed limitations and
restrictions on what can reasonably come under the auspices of public health
authorities, for reasons having to do with concerns about individual liberty, about
privacy and paternalism, about democratic process, and about the place of health in
relation to other aspects of human well-being. Thus, public health ethics also has to
engage more traditional philosophical questions about the scope of privacy, the
reach of public policy, and the limits and legitimacy of government intervention for
the public good. These issues are addressed next, in Section 2. Moreover, scarcity
and priority setting always loom large in the context of public health, giving rise to
a number of equity, justice, and fairness concerns. As already noted, these issues
are especially acute with regard to global health. Concerns about justice and
priority setting will be addressed in greater detail in Section 3.

2. Justifying Public Health Programs and Policies

Public health draws its foundational legitimacy from the essential and direct role
that health plays in human flourishing, whether that role is understood ultimately in
terms of maximizing health or promoting health in the context of advancing social
justice. This general justification is sometimes too broad, however, to provide
sufficient moral warrant for specific public health policies and institutions,
especially when, as is so often the case, these policies and institutions are
implemented by the state and affect the liberty or privacy of corporate or individual
persons. This section puts forward six justifications or reasons that can be put
forward to defend a particular public health institution or policy.
Two observations are worth making at the outset. First, public health policies are
rarely defended by only one reason. Usually a mixed set of justifications can
plausibly be provided. For example, tax policies intended to decrease cigarette
consumption can be defended both by appeal to paternalism and by appeal to
reducing the harms of second hand smoke to children in the home and in

automobiles. Second, the impact of public health policies is often not uniform
across all the individuals affected by the policy, and thus different justifications are
sometimes put forward specific to these different people. This complexity is
unavoidable, since it results from the nature of public health: The focus of public
health is population health, but populations are rarely internally uniform with
regard to all features that are morally relevant to any particular policy. Some
people may stand to benefit from the policy while others may not. Moreover, in
line with concerns about democratic legitimacy and state over-reaching, some
members of the population may support the aims of the policy while others may
object. For example, a ban on trans-fats in restaurants in New York and other
municipalities has been defended as consonant with the values and preferences of
most New Yorkers who allegedly are happy for this assistance with healthy eating;
others, however, find the policy an unacceptable intrusion by government in what
should be a matter of personal preference (Mello 2009).
The first four of the justifications for public health policies- overall benefit,
collective efficiency/action, communitarianism, and fairness- speak specifically to
the context in which some members of the affected population are not directly
benefited by the policy or object to it. The next two justifications appeal to the
significance of harm, both to others and to oneself. They apply more specifically to
traditional concerns about balancing respect for liberty with advancing health and
are more prevalent in the public health ethics literature than the previous four. In
the fifth justification, the argument is from a relatively uncontroversial Millian
harm principle, and in the sixth justification, from somewhat more tendentious
paternalistic principles.
Depending on the specifics of the public health policy, any number of these
justifications may be applicable, and they are generally used to best effect in
combination. Section 2 closes with a look at the limits of frameworks that focus
disproportionately on liberty considerations of the sort addressed in justifications
#5 and #6 and on the importance of considering the range of possible moral
justifications in analyzing public health policies.
2.1 Overall Benefit

Ultimately, we all benefit from having public health interventions, and from having
trusted regulatory agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) make decisions about such
interventions and their reach. All things considered, having public health regulation
is better than not having it. Having public health decisions made on the basis of
overall statistics and demographic trends is ultimately better for each one of us,
even if particular interventions may not directly benefit some of us. Thus, the task
of public health ethics is not necessarily to justify each particular intervention
directly. Rather, public health interventions in general, as long as they stay within
certain pre-established parameters, can be justified in the same way a market

economy, the institution of private property, or other similarly broad and useful
conventions that involve some coercive action but also enable individuals to access
greater benefits can be justified: when properly regulated and managed, its
existence is by and large better than its absence for everyone. So structured, the
justification for particular public health interventions, requirements, or restrictions
is derivative of or parasitic on a higher level justification. [2] This argumentative
strategy has a lot of appeal, particularly as a way of justifying the existence of
regulatory government agencies such as the FDA. However, it is ultimately
insufficient on its own and needs to be supplemented by other kinds of ethical
arguments, since it does not provide the basis for the parameters themselves, or for
ethical oversight or scrutiny with regards to particular decisions such agencies
take[3].
2.2 Collective Action/Efficiency

A related justification views health as a public good the pursuit of which is not
possible without ground rules for coordinated action and near-universal
participation. Thus, public health is viewed as having the structure of a
coordination or collective efficiency problem. If one person (or at least, a sufficient
number of such persons) decides to go when the traffic light is red and stop when
the traffic light is green, it does not matter that everyone else is following the rules:
this person will disrupt the smooth functioning of the system, with potentially
dangerous results. Similarly, if one person (or a sufficient critical mass of such
persons) decides not to abide by a public health regulation because the regulation
does not directly benefit her or she otherwise objects, the ramifications will likely
be felt by others in her environment and beyond. [4] Everybody has to participate
because, failing their involvement, neither they nor anyone else can reap the
benefit of a healthy society.
In many public health contexts, the only feasible or acceptably efficient way to
implement a policy affects the entire population, leaving no or only very
burdensome options open to individual non-cooperation. Perhaps the most
celebrated such example is water fluoridation, but all safety regulations affecting
food and drug supply and consumer products share this character, as do many
environmental and occupational health standards. Here collective efficiency
considerations loom large. Although we want healthy environments and products,
individuals are simply not positioned to make independent decisions about the
impact on health and safety of their environment and of the hundreds of thousands
of products available in the modern market place. Ceding this function to
government institutions staffed with health experts is prudent and essential to
general welfare and social justice in the same respect as ceding protection of our
interests in personal physical security to government institutions staffed with law
enforcement and national defense experts is prudent and essential to general
welfare (Mill 1869).

The collective efficiency class of arguments relies on claims about the sheer
number and technical complexity of the decisions that need to be made to protect
health in the environment and in the market place, as well as the indivisible
character of responses to some health threats. These arguments are buttressed by
claims about the cognitive limitations and bounded rationality of individual human
decision makers, and by the disproportionate political power of corporate interests
and the practices they use to manipulate and exploit our cognitive weaknesses
against our health interests (Ubel 2009).
2.3 Communitarianism

The communitarian argument relies on the idea that what is good for the whole is
necessarily good for its parts (Beauchamp & Steinbock 1999, p. 57).
Communitarians view individuals' identities and the meaningfulness of their lives
as indelibly tied to the well-being of their community. Thus, on this view, public
health interventions are good for individuals simply because they benefit the
community as a whole. The main appeal of this strategy is that it provides a more
nurturing, less I vs. them vision of the benefits and burdens that go into
participating meaningfully in social life. It thus encourages a cooperative way of
thinking about public health interventions. Its main shortcoming, however, is that it
assumes too tight a connection between individuals and the communities to which
they belong, thereby incurring the potential for abuses of less privileged
individuals within certain communities in the name of communal well-being. [5] It is
unfortunately not always the case that the interests of individuals and the interests
of their communities coincide in this convenient way. Rather, such interests often
come apart, and can come into conflict in ways that require us to address yet again
the questions: how much can we ask of individuals for the sake of others, of which
individuals can we ask sacrifices for the sake of the community, and why? There is
a conceptual distance between what is good for particular individuals, what is good
for all individual members of a community, and what is good for the community.
Thus, there can sometimes be direct trade-offs between what is good for the
community and what is good for particular individuals within it. Notwithstanding
these difficulties, this is certainly a strategy worth giving serious consideration as a
possible avenue for the justification of public health interventions, particularly in
some contexts where there is a strong sense of community solidarity.
2.4 Fairness in the Distribution of Burdens

Yet another appeal that can be used to defend certain public health interventions
that impose unequal burdens on different members of a population relies on
considerations of fairness. The basic premise of this line or argument would be that
burdens have to be roughly equivalent for everyone. This justifies taxing different
income brackets at different rates. The same could be said for certain public health
burdens, understood as both the burdens of disease and disability and the
burdens of public health interventions. Based on considerations such as a particular

group's likelihood to contract a certain disease, and their overall health status, other
parts of the population can legitimately be asked to contribute, as it were, in
order to make the distribution of disease burdens more equitable. For example, part
of the rationale for requiring child immunization prior to enrollment in school is
that this is a way to ensure that low-income children, who are generally less
healthy than other children, have access to the needed vaccines (Orenstein &
Hinman 1999; Feudtner & Marcuse 2001). Perhaps a more pertinent example is the
seasonal influenza immunization policy in Japan, where children are immunized
against influenza explicitly in order to protect the elderly, for whom contracting
seasonal flu is more likely to be fatal, and immunization more likely to be
burdensome (Reichert et al. 2001). Yet another example of public health
interventions that appear to be guided by this justification is rubella vaccination of
children for the sake of pregnant women and their fetuses (Miller et al. 1997; ACIP
1990). This reasoning can help explain why individuals are sometimes asked to
bear public health burdens that do not directly benefit them. However, as with the
tax case, the question of how far we can go in redistributing health-related burdens
will likely continue to plague any proponent of this justificatory strategy.
Moreover, questions about the plausibility of viewing health-related burdens as
subject to distribution in this manner may also arise.
2.5 The Harm Principle

It is likely that no classic philosophical work is cited more often in the public
health ethics literature than John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty (Mill 1869). In
that essay, Mill defends what has come to be called the harm principle, in which
the only justification for interfering with the liberty of an individual, against her
will, is to prevent harm to others. The harm principle is relied upon to justify
various infectious disease control interventions including quarantine, isolation, and
compulsory treatment. In liberal democracies, the harm principle is often viewed as
the most compelling justification for public health policies that interfere with
individual liberty. For example, a prominent view in the United States is that it was
not until the public became persuaded of the harmful effects of second hand
smoke that the first significant intrusion into smoking practicesthe banning of
smoking in public placesbecame politically possible. Perhaps because of the
principle's broad persuasiveness, it is not uncommon to see appeals made about
harm to others in less than obvious contexts. Defenders of compulsory motorcycle
helmet laws, for example, argued that the serious head injuries sustained by
unprotected cyclists diverted emergency room personnel and resources, thus
harming other patients (Jones & Bayer 2007). The harm principle has been
interpreted to include credible threat of significant economic harm to others as well
as physical harm. Returning again to smoking policy, various restrictions on the
behavior of smokers have been justified by appeal to the financial burden on the
health care system of caring for smoking-related illnesses. [6]

As with all such principles, questions remain about its specification. How
significant must the threat of harm be, with regard to both its likelihood and
magnitude of effect? Are physical harms to the health of others to be weighted
more than economic harms or other setbacks to interests? Whether interpreted
narrowly or broadly, there are limits to the public health cases that can plausibly be
placed in the harm principle box. Moreover, in the context of commitments to
social justice and general welfare, and the other justifications described above, too
exclusive a focus on the harm principle can undermine otherwise justifiable
government mandates and regulation. It is undeniable that individuals have much
broader and more multi-dimensional interests than narrowly self-directed physical
ones, and in that sense, it is not unreasonable to have a fairly expansive
understanding of harm in a public health context. However, adherence to the
admittedly somewhat artificialheuristic of construing individuals' interests as
exclusively their self-regarding ones for purposes of determining what sacrifices
they may be asked to make is an important way of ensuring checks on potential
abuses.
2.6 Paternalism

Not surprisingly, paternalismunderstood classically as interfering with the liberty

of action of a person, against her will, to protect or promote her welfareis as
controversial as the harm principle is uncontroversial (Dworkin 2005; Feinberg
1986). Few public health interventions are justified exclusively or even primarily
on unmediated, classic paternalistic grounds, although many more public health
programs may have paternalistic effects. By contrast, other classes of arguments
that are sometimes described as paternalistic, including soft paternalism, weak
paternalism, and libertarian paternalism, are evoked more frequently.
Soft and weak paternalism are usually interpreted as interchangeable, though they
have sometimes been taken to denote different concepts (Dworkin 2005). A
common interpretation defines this kind of paternalism as interferences with
choices that are compromised with regard to voluntariness or autonomy. Though a
person might voice or hold a preference different from the one that is sought for
her, her preference is not entitled to robust respect if it is formed under conditions
that significantly compromise its autonomy or voluntariness, such as cognitive
disability or immaturity and, in very limited cases, ignorance or false beliefs.
[7]
Adaptive preferences are also considered compromised with regards to
autonomy: sometimes, individuals modify their preferences in order to be able to
adapt to difficult, unjust, or undesirable circumstances. [8] Such preferences also do
not have the same standing as preferences formed under normal conditions and are
therefore viewed as subject to interference.
It is important to note that in all these cases, justified interference would be based
on conditions of autonomy/rationality that do or do not obtain in the formation or
continued holding of particular preferences. This should not be confused with

interference based on the content of particular preferences. Only the former would
be justifiable under weak or soft paternalism, whereas the latter would constitute
true or strong paternalism. As always, the demarcations are not as clear in practice
as one would wish from a theoretical point of viewthe content of preferences is
often precisely what is appealed to in illustrating that a particular preference is
compromised in regards to autonomy or voluntarinessbut by and large, what
distinguishes soft paternalism from strong paternalism is the requirement that the
decision or preference be fundamentally compromised, and not simply that it be
mistaken or ignorant. This principled distinction remains important not least
because it reflects a difference in approach or attitude: in the case of strong
paternalism, the interference is based on the content of a preference not reflecting
what is ostensibly in the preference holder's interest. [9] In the case of weak or soft
paternalism, persons might hold all manner of preferences not in their best interest
that are nonetheless not justifiably interfered with because the relevant
compromising conditions do not obtain. In public health policy, soft paternalism
has been evoked to justify interventions that limit the ability of adolescents to act
on preferences for alcohol, drugs, sexual activity and driving.
Libertarian paternalism defends interventions by planners (such as public health
authorities) in the environmental architecture in which individuals decide and act
in order to make it easier for people to behave in ways that are in their best
interests (including their health), provided two conditions are satisfied (Thaler &
Sunstein 2003; Thaler & Sunstein 2008). First, individuals are steered by these
interventions in ways that make them better off, as judged by themselves. Thus, in
libertarian paternalism there is no attempt to contravene the will of individuals, in
contrast to what some hold to be a necessary feature of paternalism. Second, the
interventions must not overly burden individuals who want to exercise their
freedom in ways that run counter to welfare. In this sense, libertarian paternalism
claims to be liberty-preserving, hence libertarian.
A key conceptual question about paternalism is whether the interference with
individual liberty must be against the person's will (Beauchamp 2010). If this
feature is a necessary condition of paternalism, then libertarian paternalism is
inappropriately titled. From the standpoint of public health ethics, however,
whether libertarian paternalism is appropriately titled is less important than the
moral issues it raises and how it is justified.
Libertarian paternalism is grounded in the extensive empirical literature in
cognitive psychology and the decision sciences that support claims about our
cognitive limitations, bounded rationality and weakness of will. Although it raises
challenging epistemic and political questions about how planners know what
individuals judge is in their interest in specific policy contexts, libertarian
paternalism may be well suited to public health contexts in which there is broad
public consensus in favor of health-promoting behaviors such as eating more fruits
and vegetables or getting more exercise, and a general recognition that it is difficult

for people to act as prudentially as they would like. Thaler and Sunstein suggest,
for example, that salads rather than French fries could be made the default side
on restaurant menus, with diners free to request fries if that remains their
preference. At the same time, libertarian paternalism has been criticized for failing
to take account of the manipulative effects on choice of some market place forces.
It has also been seen as too restrictive in its conditions (and therefore too weak) to
be applicable or adequate for many public health contexts (Nuffield Council on
Bioethics 2007; Ubel 2009).
2.7 Liberty-limiting Continua and A Central Task of Public Health Ethics

Part of the appeal of libertarian paternalism in public health policy is that, at least
in certain contexts, it appears to sidestep or in some cases resolve the tension
between liberty and health. This tension takes center stage in some analyses of the
ethics of public health, as when public health policies are placed on autonomylimiting continua and justifications #5 and #6 dominate the analysis. A recent and
influential such continuum is the Nuffield Council's intervention ladder (Nuffield
Council on Bioethics 2007), which is presented as a way of thinking about the
acceptability and justification of public health policies. The ladder is anchored at
one end by what is presented as the least intrusive option, doing nothing, and at the
other end by the what is presented as the most intrusive option, eliminating choice
altogether (as in compulsory isolation). The Council makes plain that all rungs on
the ladder, including doing nothing, require justification and that the ladder is to be
taken only as a tool in the moral analysis of public health policies. However, the
structure of the ladder and its attendant imagery reinforce the misleading view that
balancing individual liberties with achieving health benefits is the primary moral
challenge of public health while at the same time appearing to emphasize ethical
concerns about over-reaching the mission of public health over ethical concerns
about under-serving it.
Continua of this sort also oversimplify the complex impact of interventions on
choice and liberty and on relations between citizens and the state. Incentives are
not always less restrictive of choice than disincentives, and health promotion
campaigns, which are generally ranked at or near the least intrusive end of the
continuum, are not always without significant moral concern. Ad campaigns that
are transparently sponsored by public health agencies to prevent transmission of
influenza by promoting personal infection control practices or reduce obesity by
encouraging exercise and healthy eating do not raise the same moral issues as the
embedding of anti-drug or abstinence messages in the story lines of entertainment
television programming by these same authorities (FCC 2000; Forbes 2000 (Other
Internet Resources); Goodman 2006; Krauthammer 2000; Kurtz & Waxman 2000).
While the latter poses important questions about respect for liberty, government
over-reaching and democratic legitimacy, the limited effectiveness of many ad
campaigns raises important questions about whether the state is under-serving its
public health mission. Moreover, in the case of public health problems like obesity,

a reliance on health promotion campaigns and other strategies focused on

influencing the behavior of individuals may fail to place appropriate burden on the
corporate interests and structural social inequalities that arguably account for much
of the problem. Thus, depending on the circumstances, health promotion
campaigns may be unjust as well as ineffective (Buchanan 2008; Crawford 1998;
Faden 1987; McLeroy, Bibeau, Steckler, & Glanz 1988).
An important task of public health ethics is not only to provide different moral
justifications, but also to critically examine their relationship to one another in the
context of particular public health issues and activities so as to ensure a more
complete moral picture of what is at stake, and to point out where no sufficient
justification exists. In this way, public health ethics can play a more immediate
practical role in public life: by raising challenges to and providing moral scrutiny
of public health policies, it can contribute to creating an environment of
accountability where both abuses and deficiencies are less likely. Thus, in addition
to its intellectual significance, public health ethics can be an important element in
the scheme of checks and balances that help keep public health authorities from
overreaching or under-serving their mission.

3. Justice and Fairness in Public Health

Whether social justice is viewed as a side constraint on the beneficence-based
foundation of public health, or as foundational in its own right, there is broad
agreement that a commitment to improving the health of those who are
systematically disadvantaged is as constitutive of public health as is the
commitment to promote health generally (Powers and Faden 2006, Institute of
Medicine's Committee for the Study of the Future of Public Health 1988; Thomas
2002; Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2007)
In this regard, there is an intimate connection between public health and the field
of health and human rights. Many in public health accept that there is a
fundamental right to health, as codified in the United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights or otherwise, although there is less agreement about
the justification for such a right or what precisely the right entails (General
Assembly 1948). A key question for public health ethics is on whom the duties
generated by a right to health fall. Because so many of these duties require
collective action of the sort described in Section 2, governments are obvious
candidates, but so, too, are other social institutions in the private sector as well as
those global in structure that bear on the right to health. A failure on the part of
these institutions to ensure the social conditions necessary to achieve a sufficient
level of health is an injustice that on the view of many violates a basic human right.
Note that as a basic human right, the claims of the right to health are not in any
fundamental respect restricted to national borders but rather fall on the human
community, as a whole. Thus, as we discuss later in this section, the extraordinary
disparities in life expectancy, child survival and health that distinguish those who

live in rich and poor countries constitute a profound injustice that is the duty of the
global community to redress.
One task of public health ethics is to identify which inequalities in health are the
most egregious and thus which should be given high priority in public health
policy and practice. That the life expectancy of some of world's poorest
populations is over forty years less than the life expectancy of those living in some
affluent countries is a clear injustice of particular moral urgency. Not all
inequalities are so obviously egregious, however, and different accounts of justice
and of the relevance of individual responsibility for health may yield different
conclusions. On the view that Powers and Faden defend (Powers & Faden 2006,
pp. 9295), social justice demands that, insofar as possible, all children achieve a
sufficient level of health. Thus, inequalities in the health of children are a particular
moral concern. The health of children is dependent on the decisions and actions of
others and on features of the social structure over which children have no control.
The value of health to children thus does not depend on what children can do for
themselves, as it sometimes does for adults. Moreover, the level of well-being
attainable in adulthood is in important respects conditioned by the level of health
achieved in childhood. Compromised health in childhood has profound effects on
health in adulthood, as well as on the development of the cognitive skills necessary
for reasoning and self determination.
When inequalities in health exist between socially dominant and socially
disadvantaged groups, they are all the more important because they occur in
conjunction with other disparities in well-being and compound them (Powers &
Faden 2006, pp. 8792). Reducing such inequalities are specific priorities in the
public health goals of national and international institutions (Department of Health
2009; European Union 2009 (Other Internet Resources); Healthy People 2010,
2009 (Other Internet Resources); Kettner & Ball 2004; WHO 2008, Other Internet
Resources). Whether through processes of oppression, domination, or
subordination, patterns of systematic disadvantage associated with group
membership are invidious and profoundly unjust. They affect every dimension of
well-being, including health. In many contexts, poverty co-travels with the
systematic disadvantage associated with racism, sexism, and other forms of
denigrated group membership. However, even when it does not, the dramatic
differential in material resources, social influence and social status that is the
hallmark of severe poverty brings with it systematic patterns of disadvantage that
can be as difficult to escape as those experienced by the most oppressed minority
groups. Even when these patterns are lessened, the life prospects of persons living
in severe poverty or in dominated groups often continue to be far below that of
others. A critical moral function of public health is to vigilantly monitor the health
of systematically disadvantaged groups and intervene to reduce the inequalities so
identified as aggressively as possible. Keeping obligations to such groups at the
forefront of public health thinking can result in significant changes in public health
policy. For example, which countries should top the list for the expansion of

childhood vaccine programs from low to middle income countries can be

profoundly affected by keeping the moral function of vigilance with regard to
systematic disadvantage squarely in mind (Shebaya, Sutherland, Levine, & Faden
2010, Other Internet Resources).
One of the most difficult challenges for public health ethics emerges when this
important moral function conflicts with the injunction to improve, if not maximize,
aggregate or collective health outcomes. Although the health of the world's most
desperately poor can in many cases be improved by extremely cost-efficient
interventions like basic childhood immunizations and vitamin supplementation,
reducing other unjust inequalities in health can consume significant resources. For
example, in the United States, infant mortality rates are higher than in many other
wealthy nations, and they are higher still among poor and minority children. Some
state public health authorities have made reducing racial disparities in infant
mortality a top priority, accepting the view that redressing this unjust inequality is
an urgent moral concern. Other states have chosen the goal of improving infant
survival statistics overall, on grounds that the same resources will produce greater
aggregate health outcomes while at the same time pointing to the special place that
all children should hold in public health policy (HRSA 2009, Other Internet
Resources).
Still another challenge in social justice for public health ethics emerges when the
health needs of systematically disadvantaged groups conflict with other dimensions
of well-being as well as with considerations of collective efficiency. Targeting a
public health program to poor and minority communities can sometimes both serve
social justice concerns and be efficient if, for example, the health problem the
intervention targets occurs disproportionately in these groups. At the same time,
however, if the health problem is itself associated with stigma or shame, targeting
the poor and minorities may reinforce existing invidious stereotypes, thereby
undermining another critical concern of social justice, equality of social respect. In
such cases, public health authorities must decide whether a commitment to social
justice requires foregoing an efficient, targeted program in favor of a relatively
inefficient, universal program that also may produce less improvement in health for
the disadvantaged group (thus failing to narrow unjust inequalities) in order to
avoid exacerbating existing disrespectful social attitudes.
As noted in Section 2, one of the structural features of public health is that the
individuals and groups affected by its policies and programs are not uniformly
benefited or burdened. When the burdens of a policy fall heavily on those who are
already disadvantaged, the justificatory hurdle is particularly high. This concern is
at the heart of many environmental justice controversies such as the locating of
hazardous waste facilities and hazardous industries in low income communities
and countries. Global efforts to prevent and contain pandemic influenzas have also
placed significant burdens on the world's poor. For example, a principal strategy
employed to prevent avian influenza H5N1 from becoming a human pandemic is

the destruction of infected birds and the banning of household poultry in urban
settings. Many families and women affected by this policy relied on their backyard
poultry as their only disposable source of income and have been economically
devastated as a consequence. Without express focus on the interests of
disadvantaged people, the moral concerns this policy raises, particularly in the
absence of appropriate compensation and alternative livelihood opportunities,
might well go unnoticed (Bellagio Working Group 2007 (Other Internet
Resources); Faden & Karron 2009; Uscher-Pines, Duggan, Garoon, Karron, &
Faden 2007).
Public health resources are always in short supply and priority setting in public
health policy and practice is always morally challenging. Yet another important set
of tasks for public health ethics is evaluating the role that formal economic and
decision theory methods such as cost benefit, cost effectiveness and cost utility
analysis do and should play in public health, including the continuing examination
of the moral assumptions embedded in these methods. Formal methods have been
used to varying degrees by public health authorities in numerous countries in such
diverse contexts as determining what risks should be regulated in environmental
health and injury prevention policy and in setting priorities for public health goals
and coverage decisions for health care systems. Embedded in these methods are
morally controversial assumptions. If the discount rate applied to future financial
costs and benefits is also applied to future health benefits, preventive interventions
are disvalued relative to interventions whose health benefits occur in the present
(Schwappach 2007). Also problematic are willingness to pay measures as
proxies of the value of benefits or risk reduction. Arguably, these measures reify
the preferences of the privileged and fail to provide sufficient moral justification
when risks materialize (Gafni1991).
Some formal methods, including most notably cost-utility analysis, rely on what
are referred to as summary health measures in which mortality and diverse
morbidities are combined in a single metric such as a quality-adjusted or disabilityadjusted life year. These measures, and the formal methods that employ them,
sometimes rely on assessments of what may be only vague individual preferences
for trade-offs between different states of health or different kinds of benefits.
Moreover, they make morally problematic assumptions including, for example,
whether to differentially value years saved in different stages of life and about how
to disvalue specific disabilities. Depending on how these and other assumptions are
determined and specified, summary health measures have been criticized as being
ageist or not ageist enough, as discriminating unfairly against people with
disabilities, as failing to capture the moral uniqueness of life-saving, as treating as
commensurable qualitatively different losses and benefits, and as failing to take
adequate account of the claims of those who are most disadvantaged (Brock 2002;
Daniels 2008; Kappel & Sandoe 1992; Nord 2005; Powers & Faden 2006; Ubel
1999; Williams 2001).

Because formal methods and summary measures do not reflect these and other
considerations of justice, it is widely recognized that formal methods should be
used solely as aids in public health policy and not as determinative in their own
right (Lipscomb, Drummond, Fryback, Gold, & Revicki 2009).That said, there is a
powerful bias in favor of quantification and the empirical in public health policy.
Thus, there is the risk that the findings emerging from these formal analyses will
have determinative influence in policy circles. This risk is augmented by the
increasing interest in attempting to empiricize moral considerations by measuring
and aggregating the value preferences of the public about moral tradeoffs such as
prioritizing by age or life-saving potential (Baker, Bateman, & Donaldson 2008;
Menzel et al. 1999; Nord 1999). These aggregated preferences are then
transformed into weights intended to incorporate moral values directly into the
structure of the formal methodology, a move that is open to criticism on
methodological as well as substantive grounds. For example, moves of this sort
may obscure controversial moral considerations from public view and deliberation,
undermining democratic values and political legitimacy. An important role for
public health ethics is to continue to look critically at the role and specific methods
of economic and decision theory strategies for establishing priorities and regulatory
standards in public health, recognizing that considerations of cost-benefit and
efficiency are essential to public health programming and policy.

4. Global Justice
Thus far, no sharp distinctions have been drawn between the national and the
global context. Just as in the economic, environmental and security arenas, it has
become increasingly difficult to discuss the demands of justice without
metaphorically crossing national boundaries, so too from a public health point of
view. In this section, we survey six broad areas of global justice concern that
deserve further attention from a public health ethics point of view.
4.1 Research In but not For the Developing World

Medical research is sometimes undertaken in the developing world in order to

further the understanding and treatment of diseases, not primarily for the benefit of
those in the developing world, but rather for the benefit of citizens of the
developed world. In such cases, participants and their communities might well
claim that they are entitled to share in the benefits of the research. However,
compensation to participants and their communities is often non-existent or not
nearly in line with the potential benefits their participation will bring to those
fortunate enough to have been born in a different geographical location (Benatar
2002). Note that this is a different issue from the question of whether researchers
working on indigenous diseases in the developing world have a duty to provide
medical care or other ancillary services to their research subjects (Belsky &
Richardson 2004; Emanuel, Wendler, Killen, & Grady 2004; Hyder & Merritt
2009). This is less a question of justice as of research ethics more generally.

4.2 Uneven Research Focus

Much medical research is focused on diseases that affect less than 10% of the
world's population, while millions die every year from diseases that potentially
could be prevented or more easily treated if only enough research and other
medical resources were devoted to them. (Hunt & UN Economic and Social
Council 2004) Given the sheer numbers of people who needlessly die every day
from such neglected but widespread diseases, and given that the developed world
clearly has the resources to change that state of affairs, justice claims arguably also
arise in this context.
4.3 Undue (Health-Related) Burdens Imposed by a Shared World Order

Discussions within countries, for example in the UK or in the US, about uneven
distribution of government or federal resources in different localities or states are
not uncommon, and claims of justice arise when some citizens are being treated
differently from other citizens with regards to access to (in this instance) health and
medical resources. One might think that such claims cannot arise in an
international context because there is no central government that has an obligation
to disburse essential medications or other resources necessary for health such as
clean water and adequate nutrition. However, , insofar as current global institutions
of which we are all participants unduly favor some (citizens of the developed
world) over others (citizens of the developing world), claims of justice in access to
the resources necessary for health arise. More strongly, citizens of the developing
world have a justice claim on citizens of the developed world and their
representatives to modify an institutional order that embeds and upholds those
injustices (Pogge 2002; Pogge 2007).
4.4 Compensatory Claims

Many poor, underdeveloped countries that are massively underserved when it

comes to public health resources continue to suffer from the direct and indirect
effects of historical, unjust harms perpetrated by many of the world's wealthiest
countries such as colonialism, war, occupation, and other forms of violent
economic exploitation. In many cases, harms are more recent or are continuing, for
example the diamond wars in Sierra Leone and other African countries as well as
the more general on-going exploitation of local natural resources. Both the
historical effects and the persistent effects of such violence and exploitation on
public health in those countries ground additional justice-based claims against the
wealthy nations to reduce the profound inequalities in health that exist between the
world's poor and advantaged people.
4.5 Positive Duties Across Borders

In addition to compensatory or remedial justice claims that arise out of global

interactions, there is arguably a strong positive duty to provide resources to those

whose access to such resources is limited by a mere luck of the draw. Where one
happens to be born in large part determines one's ability to access medical and
other public health resources. In today's global world, we all live in close enough
proximity to each other's misfortunes that we cannot without disingenuousness
claim not to see it on our doorstep. This generates a particularly strong obligation
to attend to the public health needs of those who are particularly vulnerable to
illness and disease and lack access to medical care and other critical resources.
4.6 Mutual Benefit

Finally, there is a more pragmatic reason to attend to public health in the

developing world. Beyond claims of justice, morality, and common decency, we
live in a world where mobility and interaction within and across countries is very
high. Diseases such as SARS, H1N1, and drug-resistant TB, as well as less
headline-grabbing ailments such as cholera and malaria, are not neatly contained
within one national boundary. Citizens of all countries would benefit from
improving public health in the developing world. Contributing to the availability
and improvement of medical, sanitary, and other health-related resources for those
who live in poverty and deprivation is ultimately good for us all, whether we are in
the habit of traveling around the world or not.
As was emphasized in Section 1, public health is and ought to be about much more
than simply medical care and resources. This observation naturally extends to the
international arena. This section has focused specifically on justice claims related
to public health and medical resources in part to distinguish concerns unique to this
context from concerns that apply more broadly such as economic and
environmental ones. But improving public health in the developing world is
indelibly tied to economic, social, educational, and environmental improvements as
well, and health-related justice claims are also not easily separable from justice
claims that arise in those other contexts. The mere fact that there are people who
live in such poverty and deprivation that they and their children die of starvation
and the common cold should be a sufficient indicator that there is something
seriously wrong with global institutional schemes, and that a justice-based
obligation to remedy that situation, both from a public health point of view and
more broadly, exists.

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Acknowledgments

Section 4 draws heavily on Powers & Faden 2006, Chapters 4 and 6.

We gratefully acknowledge JP Leider for his invaluable assistance in preparing this
manuscript.
Copyright 2010 by

Ruth Faden <rfaden@jhsph.edu>

Sirine Shebaya <sirine.shebaya@yale.edu>