Curriculum development in masters of public health programs that effectively meets the complex ethical challenges of the 21st century is an important part of public health education and requires ethical reasoning and purposively thinking. Current master programs in Public Health do not regularly include modules in public health ethics. The aim of this paper is to present background and theoreti...

Receiving information about threats to one’s health can contribute to anxiety and depression. In contemporary medical ethics there is considerable consensus that patient autonomy, or the patient’s right to know, in most cases outweighs these negative effects of information. Worry about the detrimental effects of information has, however, been voiced in relation to public health more generally. ...

Public health ethics is a nascent field, emerging over the past decade as an applied field merging concepts of clinical and research ethics. Because the "patient" in public health is the population rather than the individual, existing principles might be weighted differently, or there might be different ethical principles to consider. This paper reviewed the evolution of public health ethics, t...

As the public's health-care needs increase in complexity, renewed attention is being given to the ethical dimensions of public health decision-making and the development of public health ethics as a bounded area of teaching and research. This article provides an overview of approaches to public health ethics and decision-making, and suggests ways to incorporate the professionalism competencies ...

General moral (ethical) principles play a prominent role in certain methods of moral reasoning and ethical decision-making in bioethics and public health. Examples include the principles of respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Some accounts of ethics in public health have pointed to additional principles related to social and environmental concerns, such as the precau...