Public health ethics: From foundations and frameworks to justice and global public health

Abstract

Ethics dilemmas have been present throughout the history of public health, and bioethics has devoted considerable attention to issues relevant to public health. Only recently, however, has public health ethics emerged as a recognized subfield of bioethics. Public health ethics requires that public health improvement come through just and respectful means. Bioethics in the future not only will take on more issues of public health ethics, but will apply its extensive scholarship in distributive justice to questions of global public health.