Exploring the Philosophical Foundations of the Human Rights Approach to International Public Health Ethics

Health Rights ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 97-109
Author(s):  
Kristen Hessler
Author(s):  
S. Matthew Liao

This chapter relates human rights to public health ethics and policies by discussing the nature and moral justification of human rights generally, and the right to health in particular. Which features of humanity ground human rights? To answer this question, as an alternative to agency and capabilities approaches, the chapter offers the “fundamental conditions approach,” according to which human rights protect the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life. The fundamental conditions approach identifies “basic health”—the adequate functioning of the various parts of our organism needed for the development and exercise of the fundamental capacities—as the object of a human right. A human right to basic health entails human rights to the essential resources for promoting and maintaining basic health, including adequate nutrition, basic health care, and basic education. Dutybearers include every able person in appropriate circumstances, as well as governments and government agencies, private philanthropic foundations, and transnational corporations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 9-20
Author(s):  
S. Matthew Liao ◽  

This paper relates human rights to public health ethics and policies by discussing the nature and moral justification of human rights generally, and the right to health in particular. Which features of humanity ground human rights? To answer this question, as an alternative to agency and capabilities approaches, the paper offers the “fundamental conditions approach,” according to which human rights protect the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life. The fundamental conditions approach identifies “basic health”—the adequate functioning of the various parts of our organism needed for the development and exercise of the fundamental capacities—as the object of a human right. A human right to basic health entails human rights to the essential resources for promoting and maintaining basic health, including adequate nutrition, basic health care, and basic education. Duty bearers include every able person in appropriate circumstances, as well as governments and government agencies, private philanthropic foundations, and transnational corporations.


Author(s):  
Andrew W. Siegel ◽  
Maria W. Merritt

The field of public health ethics has plural foundations in major normative ethical theories, principally consequentialism and deontology, and in ethical concepts such as social justice and human rights. This overview provides some basic background on ethical theory and introduces chapters in the related section of The Oxford Handbook of Public Health Ethics. The four chapters together elucidate the moral foundations of public health ethics. One chapter characterizes public health and describes the ethical challenges raised by its distinctive characteristics, while the next examines the ways in which public health interventions may be morally justifiable. The following two chapters focus, respectively, on justice and human rights, considering the operation of each not only as moral foundations, but also as side constraints in frameworks of public health ethics.


2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence O. Gostin

The late Jonathan Mann famously theorized that public health, ethics, and human rights are complementary fields motivated by the paramount value of human well-being. He felt that people could not be healthy if governments did not respect their rights and dignity as well as engage in health policies guided by sound ethical values. Nor could people have their rights and dignity if they were not healthy. Mann and his colleagues argued that public health and human rights are integrally connected: Human rights violations adversely affect the community's health, coercive public health policies violate human rights, and advancement of human rights and public health reinforce one another. Despite the deep traditions in public health, ethics, and human rights, they have rarely cross-fertilized—although there exists an important emerging literature. For the most part, each of these fields has adopted its own terminology and forms of reasoning. Consequently, Mann advocated the creation of a code of public health ethics and the adoption of a vocabulary or taxonomy of “dignity violation”.


2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 621-628
Author(s):  
Pranay Giripunje

Due to the pandemic, authorities of India followed public health measures to include its unfold within the India. a number of measures were imposed on public like obligatory home and institution quarantine, and social distancing. Although it being a public fitness emergency, the measures observed required crucial appraisal and use of an ethics and human rights technique. The goal of paper is to give an ethics and human rights standards to  compare public fitness measures and use it to reflect on the ethical sides of these adopted through the authorities of India to consist of the unfold of pandemic. first we discuss all the measure taken for ethics in the human rights concerns for public and their fitness measures with all the emergencies. We then brief India’s social and economic conditions and some of the measures followed to include the unlock of pandemic. After that,  some moral duty of some of India’s responses to pandemic. We then do evaluation to discover the measures adopted by  the authorities of India to slow the spread of pandemic, the ethics and human rights issues typically given for public health responder . we analysed that some of the measures violated ethics and human rights ideas. despite the fact that a some human rights can on occasion be legitimately lowered and constrained to meet public fitness dreams at some stage in public fitness emergencies, measures that infringe on human rights have to fulfil positive way of ethics and human rights standards. Other of the ones requirements i being powerful, strictly critical, proportionate to the value of the danger, questionable in the conditions, least restrictive. We tell about  India’s primary measures to fight the   pandemic and tell that a variety of them fell incomplete of those criteria, and were not effective at all.


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