Carina Fourie - Feminist Challenges to Population Health Ethics
Abstract
In this paper I argue that frameworks for population health ethics are often insufficient for addressing feminist concerns. While the nascent field of population health ethics should theoretically be congruent with various feminisms, I argue that it is developing in a way that is troubling in terms of its feminist applicability, particularly when we assess two sets of relevant literature: academic bioethics literature and health policy guidance.
First, the conceptions of justice and equality invoked in the dominant academic literature – conceptions that should be foundational to population health ethics – frequently tend to be irrelevant to or even in conflict with feminisms. I identify three primary troubling characteristics of that literature: methodological ahistoricism; distributivism; and astructuralism.
Second, while health equity is rightly becoming a key value pursued in contemporary health policies and protocols, such as guidance on pandemic preparedness and the ethical allocation of COVID-19 vaccines, I argue that it is not adequate for representing the concerns of injustice associated with feminisms because it tends to focus only on health or only on problematic gendered definitions of health and its social determinants, or both.
My paper is primarily a critique; however, it has constructive implications. In the final section, I will identify what we can learn about the required characteristics for a feminist framework of population health ethics, and explain why we need one, fending off an objection that such a generalized feminism is as troubling as the literature it criticizes.
Dial-In Information
https://unr.zoom.us/j/88056353361?pwd=Uk9HVE9HWnRQdVFUanh5ZVZxaDlCdz09
passcode: unrphil
Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm
Virtual Event- Event Type
- Departments
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College of Liberal Arts, Philosophy, Division of Health Sciences, School of Public Health
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