Coercing for public health: (when) is coercion ethically justified?
Welcome to this special issue of Monash Bioethics Review. The issue focuses on an area that has rebounded in significance and interest following increases in restrictive public health measures in recent years. Coercion—which can be conceived in the public health space as the use of measures, often by states, that limit the freedoms of an individual or population—has played an important role in the public health issues each of our contributors in this collection have examined, and many of the articles raise questions about intersections with identity, structural injustice, the role of the state, and the importance of individual liberties that must not be ignored.
In conceiving of the special issue, we the editors were struck by the current lack of consensus on when (if ever) coercion in public health is ethically acceptable, and even our own differing opinions and stances. What is the role coercion plays in the prevention of non-communicable diseases, and is this ethically different from when it is applied in the infectious disease context? How might the moral status of coercion vary across different contexts, intersecting with issues of social and structural justice that affect people’s abilities to comply with a coercive intervention? How have experiences of COVID-19 shaped the public acceptability of coercive measures against other public health emergencies today?