Professing Public Health: Practicing Ethics and Ethics as Practice -- The Good of Patients and the Good of Society: Striking a Moral Balance -- Taking on “Big Fat”: The Relative Risks and Benefits of the War Against Obesity -- Individual Rights, Social Justice, and the Allocation of Advances in Biotechnology -- Justice in Allocations for Terrorism, Biological Warfare, and Public Health -- A New Bioethics Framework for Facilitating Better Decision-Making About Genetic Information -- Sanctity of Life vs. Quality of Life in Maternal-Fetal Surgery: Personal and Public Priorities -- Gun Control and Public Health -- From Fear to Eternity: Violence and Public Health -- The Politics of Preventing Premature Death -- The Right to Die and the Right to Health Care -- Global Justice and Health: Is Health Care a Basic Right? -- Advocacy and Community: Conflicts of Interest in Public Health Research.

Public Health Policy and Ethics brings together philosophers and practitioners to address the foundations and principles upon which public health policy may be advanced. What is the basis that justifies public health in the first place? Why should individuals be disadvantaged for the sake of the group? How do policy concerns and clinical practice work together and work against each other? Can the boundaries of public health be extended to include social ills that are amenable to group-dynamic solutions? These are some of the crucial questions that form the core of this volume of original essays sure to cause practitioners to engage in a critical re-evaluation of the role of ethics in public health policy. This volume is unique because of its philosophical approach. It develops a theoretical basis for public health and then examines cutting-edge issues of practice that include social and political issues of public health. In this way the book extends the usual purview of public health. Public Health Policy and Ethics is of interest to those working in public health policy, ethics and social philosophy. It may be used as a textbook for courses on public health policy and ethics, medical ethics, social philosophy and applied or public philosophy.