Public Health Ethics: A Manifesto

In founding the journal Public Health Ethics (PHE) we have three ambitious aims. First, to define and explore the relatively new field of public health ethics. Second, to encourage interdisciplinary reflection upon, and discussion of, moral issues in the theory and practice of public health. Third, to make a contribution to the reorientation of bioethics. The first aim, defining and exploring public health ethics, is concerned with outlining and discussing a distinctive area of applied ethics: one focused on public health. What do we mean by ‘public health’? There is a large literature on this topic, and the concept is a contested one. However, elsewhere we have argued that public health activity involves two key features. First, it should aim at protecting and promoting the health of a large group or population (this excludes individual clinical encounters between doctors and patients). Second, public health actions will involve collective activities by, for example, governments, health care systems, or even society as a whole (this excludes action to improve the health of a particular individual unless it is within the context of a campaign targeted at a group or population). These two criteria together provide a rough outline of public health activity as comprising collective interventions that aim to protect and promote the health of the public (Verweij & Dawson, 2007).