Solidarity: a Moral Concept in Need of Clarification

The recently published report by Barbara Prainsack and Alena Buyx entitled Solidarity: Reflections on an Emerging Concept in Bioethics funded by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, Nuffield Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council provides a welcome opportunity to reflect upon the meaning and place of solidarity in bioethics. It is indeed remarkable that the concept of solidarity has received so little discussion in the bioethics literature. There may be a number of reasons why this is the case, but perhaps the main one is the tendency for many discussions in bioethics to focus on a limited set of values primarily related to individual freedom and debates about the limits of state action and regulation. It is unclear how solidarity might fit into such discussions. Although some discussions in public health ethics mention it in passing (Verweij 2001; Dawson, 2010) and it has appeared in a number of reports (Upshur et al., 2005), it remains a rather opaque term. So what is solidarity and how should it feature in arguments about public health ethics?