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Public Health Ethics Advance Access originally published online on June 1, 2009
Public Health Ethics 2009 2(2):135-145; doi:10.1093/phe/php010
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© 2009 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Public Health Ethics and Liberalism

Lubomira Radoilska*

Cambridge University

* Corresponding author: Faculty of Philosophy, Cambridge University, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DA, UK. Tel.: +44(0)1223335094; Fax: +44(0)1223335091; Email: lr271{at}cam.ac.uk.


  Abstract

This paper defends a distinctly liberal approach to public health ethics and replies to possible objections. In particular, I look at a set of recent proposals aiming to revise and expand liberalism in light of public health's rationale and epidemiological findings. I argue that they fail to provide a sociologically informed version of liberalism. Instead, they rest on an implicit normative premise about the value of health, which I show to be invalid. I then make explicit the unobvious, republican background of these proposals. Finally, I expand on the liberal understanding of freedom as non-interference and show its advantages over the republican alternative of freedom as non-domination within the context of public health. The views of freedom I discuss in the paper do not overlap with the classical distinction between negative and positive freedom. In addition, my account differentiates the concepts of freedom and autonomy and does not rule out substantive accounts of the latter. Nor does it confine political liberalism to an essentially procedural form.


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