Journal article
Coercive public health policies need context-specific ethical justifications
- Abstract:
- Public health policies designed to improve individual and population health may involve coercion. These coercive policies require ethical justification, and yet it is unclear in the public health ethics literature which ethical concepts might justify coercion, and what their limitations are in applying across contexts. In this paper, we analyse a number of concepts from Western bioethics, including the harm principle, paternalism, the public interest, and a duty of easy rescue. We find them plausible justifications for coercion in theory, but when applied to case studies, including HIV testing in Malawi, vaccine mandates in South Africa, and prohibitions of antibiotic use in livestock in the EU, their limitations become clear. We argue that the context-specificity of ethical justifications for coercion has been overlooked, and there is more work needed to identify context-relevant ethical justifications for coercive policies in various settings and for various populations, rather than relying on universalising Western bioethical justifications across all contexts.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 896.3KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s40592-024-00218-x
Authors
+ Wellcome Trust
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/029chgv08
- Grant:
- 221719/Z/20/Z
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Monash Bioethics Review More from this journal
- Volume:
- 43
- Issue:
- 2
- Pages:
- 350-371
- Publication date:
- 2024-10-15
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-09-17
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1836-6716
- ISSN:
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1321-2753
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
2031312
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2031312
- Deposit date:
-
2024-09-20
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Johnson et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2024
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2024, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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