Considering virtue: public health and clinical ethics

Area of Science:

• Bioethics
• Public Health Ethics
• Virtue Ethics

Background:

• Bioethicists are increasingly focusing on public health, proposing distinct ethical frameworks.
• Existing proposals for public health ethics may overlook broader implications for clinical medicine and bioethics.
• Contemporary bioethics faces critiques regarding rigor, contextual accommodation, and ethical conflict.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the impetus behind developing a distinct ethics of public health.
• To propose virtue ethics as a solution to criticisms of contemporary bioethics.
• To ensure ethical frameworks benefit both public health and curative medicine.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of contemporary bioethics discourse and its critiques.
• Application of virtue ethics principles to public health ethical challenges.
• Comparative evaluation of virtue ethics against other normative theories.

Main Results:

• A distinct ethics of public health must consider broader bioethical issues.
• Virtue ethics offers a promising approach to enhance rigor and contextual sensitivity in bioethics.
• Virtue ethics can address the nature of ethical conflict more effectively.

Conclusions:

• Developing public health ethics requires addressing contemporary bioethics' limitations.
• Virtue ethics provides a viable framework for public health ethics, avoiding isolated development.
• This approach has the potential to refine bioethics discourse more broadly.