Moral evaluation and concepts of health and health promotion

This article considers the moral implications of some of the ways in which society, including nursing, thinks about health and health promotion. How we think about health shapes what we describe as healthy or unhealthy, as well as those factors that promote or hinder the attainment and maintenance of health. In turn, these concepts lead to actions that have moral significance. These issues are of particular import to nursing because health is central to what we understand our aims to be. To this end, the article addresses definitions of health, the relationship between morality and health, health promotion and the moral harms following from some of those practices, and the challenges to nursing.