Ethics: From Health care to Public Policy

Abstract

An adequate ethics of health promotion would have to address a very broad range of practical and theoretical concerns. Some of these concerns will be relatively familiar to students of professional ethics or health care ethics, others raise more fundamental questions of moral and political philosophy. This range and complexity is, in large part, a result of the open-ended and contestable nature of health promotion itself. Indeed it is impossible to reflect on the ethics of health promotion without also giving thought to other conceptual and philosophical questions raised by health promotion, and I will begin with a few summary remarks about the nature of health promotion as a ‘subject matter’ for ethics.