Relational Liberty Revisited: Membership, Solidarity, and a Public Health Ethics of Place

Abstract

Public health involves the use of power to change institutions and redistribute resources and deliberately to shape of individual thought and behavior. This requires normative legitimation and demands ethical critique. This paper explores concepts that are vital to public health ethics, but have been relatively neglected. These are membership, solidarity, and the concept of place. The paper argues that the practice of public health should recognize the equal rights of membership in communities of health justice. Public health should also rely on a sense obligation and mutual aid in a world of shared vulnerability and reciprocal recognition. Finally, public health achieves its goals not merely — and perhaps not most fundamentally — through information and altering the logical ratiocination of individuals or groups, but rather through the reformation of sense and sensibility.

Keywords: Community, dignity, liberalism, mutuality, membership, place, relational liberty, solidarity