Defining the Scope of Public Engagement: Examining the “Right Not to Know” in Public Health Genomics

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarissa Allen ◽  
Karine Sénécal ◽  
Denise Avard
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Health Initiatives ◽  
Genetic Technologies ◽  
Recent Debate ◽  
Right Not To Know ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right

While the realm of bioethics has traditionally focused on the rights of the individual and held autonomy as a defining principle, public health ethics has at its core a commitment to the promotion of the common good. While these two domains may at times conflict, concepts arising in one may also be informative for concepts arising in the other. One example of this is the concept of a “right not to know.” Recent debate suggests that just as there is a “right to know” information about one's genetic status, there is a parallel “right not to know” when it comes to genetic information that if communicated, could be detrimental to an individual's social or psychological well-being. As new genetic technologies continue to change the nature of genetic testing and screening, it is crucial that normative frameworks to guide and assess genetic public health initiatives be developed. In this context, the question of whether a “right not to know” may also be said to exist for populations on a public health level merits attention.

scholarly journals State security as exemplified by the fight against terrorism: a choice between the well-being of the individual and the well-being of the community

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 404-420
Author(s):  
Remigiusz Rosicki
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual

The objective scope of the analysis encompasses special measures used in the fight against terrorism in the context of ethical and constitutional principles attributed to a democratic state ruled by law and a liberal democracy. A practical example of a special measure used in the fight against terrorism, and presented in the text, is furnished by the content of one of the articles in the Polish Aviation Law, which was found unconstitutional in 2008. The content of this article made it possible for an administrative authority to make a decision with regard to consenting to the destruction of a civil aircraft, if it was used as a means of terrorist attack. The main purpose of the paper is to consider the acceptable scope of radical measures in the fight against terrorism, while taking into account the reinterpretation of priorities in the hierarchy of legal principles. In order to elaborate the objective scope of the analysis, the following research question is phrased: To what extent is it possible to sacrifice the well-being of the individual (dignity, rights and freedoms) for the sake of the common good (security)? The adopted analysis methodology is based on a thought experiment consisting in the reinterpretation of ethical principles and the values of the constitutional norms in a democratic state ruled by law and a liberal democracy. With the benefit of essentialist reduction, it is posited that the two competing constitutional principles are the principle of dignity and the principle of the common good; they can be reduced to, for instance, protection of the life of an individual or of members of the community as a whole. Abstrakt Zakres przedmiotowy analizy obejmuje zagadnienie szczególnych środków walki z terroryzmem w kontekście zasad etycznych i konstytucyjnych przypisanych demokratycznemu państwu prawa i demokracji liberalnej. Przykładem praktycznym szczególnego środka walki z terroryzmem zaprezentowanym w tekście jest treść jednego z artykułów polskiego Prawa lotniczego, który został uznany za niekonstytucyjny w 2008 roku. Treść artykułu dawała możliwość podjęcia decyzji przez organ administracji publicznej w zakresie wyrażenia zgody zniszczenia cywilnego statku powietrznego w sytuacji, gdy ten użyty jest jako środek ataku terrorystycznego. Głównym celem pracy jest rozważanie zakresu dopuszczalności stosowania radykalnych środków walki z terroryzmem przy uwzględnieniu reinterpretacji priorytetów w hierarchii zasad prawnych. W celu uszczegółowienia zakresu przedmiotowego analizy zaprezentowano następujące pytanie badawcze: W jakim zakresie możliwe jest poświęcenie dobra jednostki (godności, praw i wolności) na rzecz dobra wspólnego (bezpieczeństwa)? Metoda analizy opiera się na eksperymencie myślowym polegającym na reinterpretacji zasad etycznych i wartości norm konstytucyjnych w demokratycznym państwie prawa i demokracji liberalnej. Przyjęto za pomocą redukcji esencjonalnej, że dwie rywalizujące ze sobą zasady konstytucyjne, to zasada godności i zasada dobra wspólnego, które mogą być sprowadzone np. do ochrony życia jednostki lub członków wspólnoty jako całości.

scholarly journals Moral Messaging in a Time of COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Misiak ◽  
Petr Tureček ◽  
Oliver Scott Curry
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Behaviour ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Health Measures ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Common ◽  
Specific Culture ◽  
The Individual

Do appeals to moral values increase compliance with COVID-19 public health measures? According to the theory of ‘Morality as cooperation’, morality consists of a collection of cooperative principles that help us get along, work together and promote the common good. We experimentally investigated whether messages that appeal to these moral principles increase pandemic-related public health behaviour. We investigated: (a) Are moral messages more effective than non-moral messages? (b) Are some moral messages more effective than others? c) Is the effectiveness of moral messages dependant on the corresponding moral values of the individual? (d) Do these effects hold across cultures? Participants (recruited from the USA and India) were presented with one of ten messages, asked questions about their intentions to follow the restrictions, were asked to donate to a charity fighting COVID-19, and completed the Morality-as-Cooperation Relevance Questionnaire. We found that: (a) Moral messages were more effective in increasing the donation than a non-moral message and more effective in increasing the intentions to act prosocially than a lack of message. (b) Messages appealing to heroism increased the intentions to act prosocially in both samples. (c) The effectiveness of moral messages was better when they were concordant with participants’ moral values, but only in the USA sample. (d) We also found that some moral messages were effective only in a particular population. Thus, moral messages may increase compliance with public health guidelines, but it is necessary to appeal to particular values and to tailor these messages for a specific culture.

scholarly journals The King of Dirt: Public Health and Sanitation in Late Medieval Ghent

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janna Coomans
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Urban Sanitation ◽  
Preventative Health ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Common

Taking the office of the coninc der ribauden in Ghent as a case-study, this article reconstructs the enforcement of urban sanitation and preventative health practices during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The coninc managed a wide range of issues perceived as potentially polluting, damaging or threateningto health. Banning waste and chasing pigs as well as prostitutes off the streets, the office implemented a governmental vision on communal well-being. Health interests, as part of a broader pursuit of the common good, therefore played an important yet hitherto largely overlooked role in medieval urban governance.

Law and the public’s health

2021 ◽  
pp. 291-300
Author(s):  
Lawrence O. Gostin
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Right To Life ◽  
Positive Duty ◽  
Human Right ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right

Public health law safeguards the health and safety of the population, promoting the human right to life and health, and the realization of social justice. There is sometimes a tension between public health regulation to promote community health and protecting individual liberty and autonomy. Governments must balance the common good with individual freedoms. In many countries, there are constitutional rights to health or to life that provide a positive duty on government to advance the right to health. Governments have multiple legal tools available to improve the public’s health and safety, ranging from the economic power to tax and spend, to the authority to alter the environments in which people live, through to direct and indirect regulation, including, where necessary, deregulation. Although the law can be a powerful agent for change, intervention can also raise critical social, ethical, or constitutional concerns. These issues are illustrated through four brief case studies on infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases, unintentional injuries, and violence to self or others.

scholarly journals The king of dirt: public health and sanitation in late medieval Ghent

Urban History ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
JANNA COOMANS
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Urban Sanitation ◽  
Preventative Health ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Common

ABSTRACT:Taking the office of theconinc der ribaudenin Ghent as a case-study, this article reconstructs the enforcement of urban sanitation and preventative health practices during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Theconincmanaged a wide range of issues perceived as potentially polluting, damaging or threatening to health. Banning waste and chasing pigs as well as prostitutes off the streets, the office implemented a governmental vision on communal well-being. Health interests, as part of a broader pursuit of the common good, therefore played an important yet hitherto largely overlooked role in medieval urban governance.

Political Authority and the Common Good

2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 877-892
Author(s):  
George Duke
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right ◽  
Reason For Action

This article argues that the natural law common good is the best candidate value to ground a direct justification of political authority. The common good is better placed than rival values to ground a direct justification for three related reasons. First, the common good is the right kind of value to serve in a justification of political authority insofar as it is a reason for action which provides a convincing answer to the fundamental question ‘why have authority at all?’ Second, the common good allows for a justification of political authority that pertains to a complete political community rather than subjects taken individually. Third, the common good allows for a reconciliation of two apparently conflicting features of political authority: (1) its ultimate role is to promote the good of individuals and (2) it can require the subordination of the good of the individual to the good of the community.

Conscience and Religious Freedom Trump Public Health

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
Michael Arthur Vacca ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
Public Health And Safety

Conscience rights and public health often come into conflict. Both Catholic social teaching and the natural moral law give primacy to conscience and religious freedom. Those who put public health on a par with conscience and religious freedom, or who imply an equivalence among them, as if they were comparable elements of public policy, are misguided, however well intentioned. Ironically, the common good that is the foundation of the right to public health is harmed by violating conscience and religious freedom. The principle should be clear: all of society, not solely the state, should promote the common good through public health and safety measures insofar as doing so does not violate the dignity of the human person, especially in matters of conscience and religious freedom.

scholarly journals Fortune, Felicity and Happiness in the Early Modern Period

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Katrin Röder ◽  
Christoph Singer
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Material Wealth ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Active Pursuit ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Essay On Man ◽  
The Individual

OH happiness! our being’s end and aim! Good, pleasure, ease, content! whate’er thy name: That something still which prompts th’ eternal sigh, For which we bear to live, or dare to die … Fix’d to no spot is happiness sincere, ’Tis no where to be found, or ev’ry where: ’Tis never to be bought, but always free, And fled from monarchs, St. John! dwells with thee. … Some place the bliss in action, some in ease, Those call it pleasure, and contentment these … Who thus define it, say they more or less Than this, that happiness is happiness? …Alexander Pope’s lines from the Essay on Man (1734) suggest the richness, diversity and overwhelming, transgressive nature of the concept of happiness. In the above quotation, happiness seems to be curiously self-evident and inconclusive at the same time. It is the central motivation for any action or non-action, all-pervasive, omnipresent and elusive. The obviousness with which Pope uses the word ‘happiness’ for so many different states of existence (material wealth, flourishing, bliss, the good life, the common good) is, however, the result of a long process of semantic change that is convincingly described by Phil Withington: being ‘derived from the Old Norse noun hap, meaning luck or fortune’, the word ‘happiness’ was, according to Withington’s findings, first used by William Caxton in his translation of Raoul Lefèvre’s French History of Troy. The addition of the English suffix ‘ness’ to the adjective ‘happy’ denotes ‘the quality and state of hap (i.e. fortune) or the circumstances and phenomena that exemplified such a condition’. The word changed its meaning from denoting good luck and favourable external (providential) conditions to signifying ‘the active pursuit of virtue and the common good’. Happiness became an umbrella term referring to a ‘commonplace mixture of physical well-being and psychological content’, to the individual and collective desire for and pursuit of ‘public improvement’, autonomy, liberty, ‘consumer self-interest and national aggrandisement’.

What Can Economists Contribute to the Common Good Tradition?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Yuengert
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Common Pool Resources ◽  
Economic Approach ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Private Provision ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Insight Into

Although most economists are skeptical of or puzzled by the Catholic concept of the common good, a rejection of the economic approach as inimical to the common good would be hasty and counterproductive. Economic analysis can enrich the common good tradition in four ways. First, economics embodies a deep respect for economic agency and for the effects of policy and institutions on individual agents. Second, economics offers a rich literature on the nature of unplanned order and how it might be shaped by policy. Third, economics offers insight into the public and private provision of various kinds of goods (private, public, common pool resources). Fourth, recent work on the development and logic of institutions and norms emphasizes sustainability rooted in the good of the individual.

Theology as Work: The Mandatum and the Rights of Labor

Horizons ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-134
Author(s):  
Patrick T. McCormick
Keyword(s):  
Academic Freedom ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Catholic Social Teaching ◽  
Social Teaching ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Church ◽  
Safe Working

ABSTRACTMany oppose the mandatum as a threat to the academic freedom of Catholic scholars and the autonomy and credibility of Catholic universities. But the imposition of this juridical bond on working theologians is also in tension with Catholic Social Teaching on the rights and dignity of labor. Work is the labor necessary to earn our daily bread. But it is also the vocation by which we realize ourselves as persons and the profession through which we contribute to the common good. Thus, along with the right to a just wage and safe working conditions, Catholic Social Teaching defends workers' rights to a full partnership in the enterprise, and calls upon the church to be a model of participation and cooperation. The imposition of the mandatum fails to live up to this standard and threatens the jobs and vocations of theologians while undermining this profession's contribution to the church.

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