scholarly journals International trade and investment law: a new framework for public health and the common good

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Delany ◽  
Louise Signal ◽  
George Thomson
2021 ◽  
pp. 89-109
Author(s):  
James Wilson

Public health policies are often accused of being paternalistic, or to show the ‘Nanny State’ in action. This chapter argues that complaints about paternalism in public health policy are, for a variety of reasons, much less convincing than is often thought. First, for conceptual reasons, it is difficult to specify what it would be for a policy to be paternalistic. Second, two of the elements that make paternalism problematic at an individual level—interference with liberty and lack of individual consent—are endemic to public policy contexts in general and so cannot be used to support the claim that paternalism in particular is wrong. The chapter concludes that instead of debating whether a given policy is paternalistic, it would be better to ask whether the infringements of liberty it contains are justifiable, without placing any weight on whether or not those infringements of liberty are paternalistic.


Urban Health ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 169-178
Author(s):  
Richard Rodger

Historical perspectives on urban health focus mainly on the production of public health, on strategies and policies deployed by towns and cities that are authorized to act for the common good. This chapter gives a largely chronological perspective on public health developments, from medieval to early modern, and then to a consideration of the major shifts in public health that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although in this chapter most attention is devoted to European trends, the colonization of the Americas, Africa, and Asia ensured networks of knowledge that were, by contemporary standards, quite quickly disseminated, though locally taken up at very variable rates. The historical study of public health is, therefore, an inherently worldwide one, with the important qualification that the pace of change and uptake of ideas was uneven.


Author(s):  
Lotje Elizabeth Siffels

Abstract In the Netherlands, as in many other nations, the government has proposed the use of a contact-tracing app as a means of helping to contain the spread of the corona virus. The discussion about the use of such an app has mostly been framed in terms of a tradeoff between privacy and public health. This research statement presents an analysis of the Dutch public debate on Corona-apps by using the framework of Orders of Worth by Boltanski and Thévenot (1991). It argues that this framework can help us to move beyond the dichotomy of privacy vs. public health by recognizing a plurality of conceptions of the common good in the debate about contact-tracing apps. This statement presents six orders of worth present in the Dutch debate: civic, domestic, vitality, market, industrial and project, and argues that the identification of which common goods are at stake will contribute to discussions about the use of this technology from a standpoint with a richer ethical perspective.


2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 587-612 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH SHEARGOLD ◽  
ANDREW D. MITCHELL

AbstractChapters relating to regulatory coherence or cooperation are likely to be significant features of new preferential trade agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). While the potential for harmonization of standards or institutional cooperation to impact on the regulatory autonomy of treaty parties has been well considered, this article focuses on those elements of regulatory coherence that relate to domestic processes for the development of regulations. It examines whether the adoption of ‘good regulatory practices’ in accordance with the TPP will help to ensure that measures states enact to protect non-economic interests (such as the environment or public health) are consistent with other key obligations of international trade and investment law. Although many elements of good regulatory practice mirror the criteria used to distinguish legitimate regulatory measures from disguised protectionism, there is no guarantee that a tribunal will come to the same conclusions as those reached during a domestic impact assessment.


Author(s):  
Jonathan H. Marks

This chapter reviews the related notions of the common good, the public good, and the public interest. Although corporations can contribute to the common good, they are not guardians of the common good. That is the responsibility of government bodies and public officials. There may be reasonable disagreements about how to define and promote the common good. But policymakers should not conflate the commercial interests of powerful industry actors with the common good. Nor should public officials confound the common good and common ground. Finding common ground with industry ordinarily requires public officials to take off the table interventions that might promote the common good. Public health officials should expressly consider ways to promote the public health that may not create benefits for the private sector, and may even be inimical to the interests of industry.


Author(s):  
L. RAVEZ

Public health needs its own ethical values. Public health ethics is guided by a core value: the defense of the common good, which may, in certain circumstances, conflict with the respect for individual freedom. The management of contagious infectious diseases in general, and the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in particular offer many examples of this ethical clash. Both victim and vector of the disease, the contagious patient must benefit from the best possible care and at the same time accept a duty of solidarity towards those he may infect. If, however, in certain circumstances, health constraints can be imposed on citizens in order to protect the common good, these coercive measures should be guided by clear ethical benchmarks. First of all, the threat for which we seek protection, must be significant and realistic. Secondly, the coercive measures put in place must have proven their effectiveness. Thirdly, the inconveniences linked to these measures must be proportional to the expected benefits and the targeted threat. Finally, the measures must be as least restrictive as possible.


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