Defining Public Health Ethics for Practitioners

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter stresses the collective nature of public health, defines public health ethics, and relates the latter to narrative ethics. The chapter offers four ways to define public health ethics; namely, through its problems, practice, procedure, and principles. Every area of Public Health Service poses ethics problems that involves either training issues, compliance with ethical rules and standards, or a utilitarian weighing of courses of action. The practice of public health ethics not only analyzes and addresses emergent ethical problems but also integrates ethics upstream into the design of public health programs. A public health ethics procedure provides a systematic framework for analyzing ethical problems, for designing and evaluating interventions, and for justifying one’s decisions. The chapter explores the core principles found in the American Public Health Association’s 2019 Public Health Code of Ethics. This Code reflects public health’s emphasis on health equity, inclusiveness, and engagement with marginalized communities. Accordingly, the subsequent discussion calls attention to an approach that advocates empathic listening to community members, namely, Human-centered design. The chapter closes by suggesting that narrative ethics can improve the capacity of practitioners to empathically hear the voices and stories of community members and thereby improve public health practice.