Public Health, Ethics, and Human Rights: A Tribute to the Late Jonathan Mann

famously theorized that pub-lic health, ethics, and human rights are complementary fields motivated by the paramount value of human well-being.He felt that people could not be healthy if governments did not respect their rights and dignity as well as engage in health policies guided by sound ethical values.Nor could people have their rights and dignity if they were not healthy.Mann and his colleagues argued that public health and human rights are integrally connected: Human rights violations adversely affect the community's health, coercive public health policies violate human rights, and advancement of human rights and public health reinforce one another. 1Despite the deep traditions in public health, ethics, and human rights, they have rarely cross-fertilizedalthough there exists an important emerging literature. 2 For the most part, each of these fields has adopted its own terminology and forms of reasoning.Consequently, Mann advocated the creation of a code of public health ethics and the adoption of a vocabulary or taxonomy of "dignity violations." 3 Mann's intellectual and emotional appeal profoundly influenced a generation of scholars, practitioners, and activists.It is now common, and fashionable, to use the discourse of public health, ethics, and human rights in social commentary and as a tool of scholarly analysis.True to Mann's vision, people in these fields collaborate much more often and express each other's language and ideas.The rhetoric of ethics and human rights is frequently applied to the theory and practice of public health.Given the prevalence of this discourse, observers might assume that a coherent, systematic understanding of public health ethics and human rights exists or, at least, that scholars comprehend the complex relationships among the fields.