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Stefan Huster, Thomas Schramme, Expanding the Normative Framework of Public Health Ethics: Some Results from an Interdisciplinary Research Group, Public Health Ethics, Volume 8, Issue 1, April 2015, Pages 4–6, https://doi.org/10.1093/phe/phu043
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The papers in this special section stem from the opening conference of the research group ‘Normative Aspects of Public Health’, which was based at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Bielefeld, Germany, in 2013–2014. The main foci of this group were issues of justice in the distribution of health as well as problems in interfering with individual liberty to protect and enhance population health. The group also dealt with wider normative and theoretical issues such as the concept of health and the purposes of state action. Its main aim was to build a theoretical basis for a rational discussion of public health measures within German society, something that has not yet been advanced as much as in other countries. Public health ethics, as we conceived it in the group, always has a national context because state institutions and legal regulations differ in different countries. In some respects, the work of our group was therefore consciously restricted in its outlook, as our perspective was a particularly German one. Of course, there are still normative issues in public health policy that can be addressed in a more general way, since they concern more abstract questions, such as the responsibilities of the state towards its citizens and between citizens, or the problem of how to set the right incentives to encourage healthy choices. The papers published here have a more general outlook and hence should be of interest to anyone interested in normative issues of public health.
