Abstract

Several global health challenges including emergencies like Ebola, environmental disasters, rising epidemic of noncommunicable diseases, and persisting health inequities, among others, have raised serious concerns about public health goals and practices and necessitate an ethical lens to the “lessons learned” from such challenges. The last two decades or so have witnessed an increasingly explicit engagement with public health ethics in academic and professional forums trying to carve out a distinct field of inquiry – distinct from clinical and bioethics though sharing a historical legacy with these two fields. This chapter joins this conversation to map this emerging field of inquiry in the context of public health goals and values, and examine its implications in the context of India. The chapter shows how ethics is at the heart of public health practice and the methodology of doing public health ethics demands a critical and reflective lens that discerns ethical dilemmas/challenges in everyday practice and resolved through individual and collective deliberations. Ethics in public health practice is hence not a one-off activity of seeking ethical approval for research. It involves application of an ethical reasoning in all components of practice including policy making, program design/implementation/monitoring/evaluation, different kinds of research, and communication and advocacy.