Integrating Bioethics in Public Health

Abstract

Acknowledging world-wide socioeconomic inequalities and health ­disparities has inspired a call for global ethics, but Realpolitik remains oblivious and continues to support economic and political globalization that weakens nations, increases inequity, and condemns the poor and disempowered to helplessness. International proclamations notwithstanding, actual commitment to improve the social, sanitary, and environmental problems increasingly plaguing the less fortunate majority of the world’s population, are feeble or absent. These conditions are deepened and entrenched by status quo politics, to the point that poverty, need, and disparity are being naturalized by those basking in the benefits of technoscientific progress and material affluence.

Academic support of global justice and universal human rights has been ineffective. The ethics of protection strongly endorses public health practices that are true to the democratic mandate of engaging in bottom-up acknowledgement of the needs burdening vast segments of human population, as well as appreciable pockets of marginalization and poverty in the backyard of the affluent. If protection takes priority over justice, as here proposed, public health will give utmost importance to the most basic medical needs, and apply its efforts to the immediately and deeply health-damaging environmental disorders. Guided by the ethics of protection, public health validates its claim to eliminate health inequalities and reduce health-related social and environmental factors that hamper people’s empowerment.