Module 14 Challenges of Public Health Leadership
Overview
This module provides us with an opportunity to engage in careful ethical reflection about what has become one of the leading practical challenges of our lifetimes: the multifaceted public-health crisis unleashed by a global pandemic.
Learning Objectives
Upon successful completion of this module, you will be able to:
Discern the scope of the duty of veracity (truth-telling) in an emergency and identify the roles to which it especially applies.
Interrogate the ethical duties that individuals have to promote the common good (public health), as well as the obligation of authorities to safeguard individual well-being.
Weigh the competing goods of individual privacy against public health by debating a recent proposal about disease mitigation via contact tracing and governmental surveillance.
Key Concepts
This module focuses on the following major topics:
Responsibility and accountability for truthful communication and information sharing in a public emergency
A survey of approaches to the ethics of public health in the discipline of philosophical ethics
In a public health emergency like a pandemic, should individuals sacrifice some privacy for the sake of the welfare of society as a whole?
Read
DiResta, R. (2020, May 6). Virus experts aren’t getting the message out. Retrieve from The Atlantic. (Links to an external site.)
”Lena H. Sun, ““CDC: Covid-19 death toll is twice as high among people of color under age 65 as for white Americans:”
CDC’s Office of Science statement on Public Health Ethics:
Case Study 1: Michelle R. Smith, Colleen Long, Jeff Amy, “States Accused of Fudging or Bungling COVID-19 Testing Data:”
Supplemental reading for Case Study 1: Greg Allen, “Florida Ousts Top COVID-19 Data Scientist:”
Case Study 2: Derek Thompson, “The Technology that Could Free America from Quarantine:”
The Metaphysics Research Lab. (2020). Public Health Ethics. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieve from Stanford | Center for the Study of Language and Information.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/publichealth-ethics/
