ArticlePublic health ethics2009
Public Health Ethics and Liberalism.
Article in Public health ethics, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Why the Social Gradient in Health-Related Behaviour is Unjust : An Unconditionalist Perspective.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2026Article
- Taking pleasure seriously: Should alcohol research say more about fun?Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2025Article
- COVID-19: Public health issues and ethical dilemmas.Ethics, medicine, and public health · 2021Review
- Thoughts on the ethics of gestational surrogacy: perspectives from religions, Western liberalism, and comparisons with adoption.Journal of assisted reproduction and genetics · 2020Article
- Health Outcome Prioritization in Alzheimer's Disease: Understanding the Ethical Landscape.Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD · 2020Review
- The Ethics of Taxing Sugar-Sweetened Beverages to Improve Public Health.Frontiers in public health · 2020Article
- Can Republicanism Tame Public Health?Public health ethics · 2016Article
- Developing public health ethics learning modules - can we learn from critical pedagogy?Public health reviews · 2015Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This paper defends a distinctly liberal approach to public health ethics and replies to possible objections. In particular, I look at a set of recent proposals aiming to revise and expand liberalism in light of public health's rationale and epidemiological findings. I argue that they fail to provide a sociologically informed version of liberalism. Instead, they rest on an implicit normative premise about the value of health, which I show to be invalid. I then make explicit the unobvious, republican background of these proposals. Finally, I expand on the liberal understanding of freedom as non-interference and show its advantages over the republican alternative of freedom as non-domination within the context of public health. The views of freedom I discuss in the paper do not overlap with the classical distinction between negative and positive freedom. In addition, my account differentiates the concepts of freedom and autonomy and does not rule out substantive accounts of the latter. Nor does it confine political liberalism to an essentially procedural form.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.