3.1 Public health law and ethics

Governments worldwide have a responsibility to fulfil their moral mandate to protect citizens from foreseeable threats of harm, including health threats. Public health laws provide the government with the authority to take action to protect its citizens. The laws often include provisions that deter certain behaviours; for example, issuing fines or jail terms for adulterating food.

Have you noticed how your government is handling the Covid-19 pandemic? For example, are people required to stay at home? Have schools been closed? Are face masks required when you leave the house? Government actions in response to the pandemic are often governed by the public health laws enacted in your country.

There are also international public health regulations that affect how governments respond to pandemics and other infectious disease outbreaks. (International frameworks are discussed later in this section.)

Laws and ethics in public health serve unique yet complementary purposes: whereas laws are formal, and include statutes and regulations, ethics are less formal, involving moral norms, codes of conduct and so on. Laws provide the boundaries of what you must do and must not do, but they often cannot tell you what you should do. Sometimes, laws may conflict with our moral values (what we ought to do). Laws and ethics can be synergistic: ethics can provide moral guidance when the law is indeterminate or allows discretion.

Essentially, we must justify whether interference with a person’s rights is justified to protect public health and whether it is proportionate to the threat. And so we arrive at the central problem with public health law and ethics: balancing the rights and responsibilities of the individual, the community and the government. In public health law, the collective rights outweigh the individual’s rights, but there must be some discretion when making decisions to protect the community.