Pluralism and Public Health

Dear Colleagues,

(1) Most public health interventions and policies aim primarily at the population at large, or some sizeable subset of that. Vaccination or screening programs, sin taxes, restrictions on recreational drugs or tobacco: even if they do not work if no individual is (positively) affected, they all aim at improving the health outcomes of the population (or the subset.)

At the same time, one, if not the, main theme in contemporary political philosophy (and related areas, such as social/political epistemology) is the fact of reasonable pluralism: we disagree profoundly about normative issues, rankings of values, and so on, and this disagreement is reasonable in the sense that no non-authoritarian “solution” to end this disagreement seems forthcoming. Hence, it is foreseeable that some individuals in the population will disagree to just about any public health intervention, and disagree reasonably. It seems that the aims of public health and (much) contemporary political philosophy—to be able to justify policies to citizens in the light of their own reasons—are at loggerheads.

(2) Not much public health thinking has engaged seriously with the fact of reasonable disagreement, and therefore neither with the obvious potential for conflict between public health interventions and individual reasonable dissenters.  The Special Issue aims to collect a variety of philosophical viewpoints and theoretical approaches to shed more light on it.

(3) For this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following: public health ethics, applied or political philosophy, bioethics, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaethics, or any other field that can further our understanding of the relationship between pluralism, reasonable disagreement, and public health. Some suggested themes:

• Can population-based interventions (e.g., vaccination programs) respect reasonable disagreement?
• What is the relationship between contemporary public reason—liberalism—and public health ethics?
• What is the proper role of (medical and other relevant) sciences for public health, in light of reasonable disagreement?
• How can metaethics (and other related fields) contribute to our understanding of the relationship between public health and reasonable disagreement?
• Is state “health propaganda” (as broadly construed as possible) justifiable?
• Is it legitimate to ascribe to “health” a special role in public policies?

I/We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Morten Ebbe Juul Nielsen
Guest Editor

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• public health
• public reason
• reasonable disagreement
• pluralism
• science and public policy