Towards a value-centred public health ethics

FORMAT | Poster paper

LANGUAGE | English

HOW TO CITE| SANDU, Antonio (2016). Towards a value-centred public health ethics. Prezentata la 13th World Congres of Bioethics, IAB 2016, 14-17 June, Edinburgh.

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ABSTRACT:

We will argue the importance of constructing a values-based ethics relating to the public health system. The ideal of epistemic neutrality is made congruent with the requirement to act in order to achieve a set of values by divesting the moral agent of its axiological competence. In applied ethics, including the public health service, the axiological competence belongs to the collective subject. From the perspective of the ethics of communication, axiological competence is the result of communicative action.
The research is based on individual and group interviews conducted in North-Eastern Romania. The results were generated through the use of grounded-theory methodology.
We bring together a number of arguments to replace the axiologic distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic values, with the distinction between constitutive values and operational values, in the context of constructing a social-constructionist set of ethics in public health.
We consider the public good and justice as constitutive values, while fairness, equity, justice, transparency and responsibility are operational ethical values associated with the any system of public health. The constitutive values are those values which impact on the appearance and operation of a system as it affects social institutions in this case those of the public health system of Romania. Operational ethical values are the values that are associated with the management of the operation of an institutional system and sets its limits. We support the derivability of such a system from principles of ethical values, and it can be thought of as axiologic-centered bioethics, concurrent with the principlist one.

KEYWORDS:

constitutive values, operational values, public health ethics.