This year marks the centenary of John Rawls's birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A Theory of Justice. The influence of Rawls's landmark book on the general fields of moral and political philosophy is undisputed and well-documented. It has also left a significant imprint on debates surrounding health policy, health care, and health inequalities. This article traces the changing ways in which Rawls's theory influenced debates about justice in health over the last five decades. Just as Rawls's (...) ideas have shaped debates about health, however, these debates can help us critically appraise the theory and its limitations. In that spirit, the article sketches three areas where a focus on health reveals challenges to the Rawlsian framework: the issue of priority setting among competing goods, the theory's egalitarian commitments, and its focus on the distribution of goods. (shrink)

In “Neutrality and Perfectionism in Public Health,” Hafez Ismaili M’hamdi poses a dilemma for defenders of “state neutrality” about political justification: either they must reject a wide ra...

Eating local food has become a mainstream proxy for virtue and a reliable model of sustainable dieting. It suffers, nonetheless, from genuine criticisms and limitations. In this paper, we suggest theoretical amendments to reorient the local food movement and turn eating local into a robust concept—comprehensive, coherent, and inclusive, affording a firm grip over structural aspects of the food chain. We develop our argument in three parts. The first contends that ‘local’ can be said of lots of entities (e.g. whole (...) or multi-ingredient foods, recipes, menus) and that its meaning varies depending on which entities are under consideration. The second examines three dimensions of being local: the distance from the place of production; the geographical origins; the social links to consumers and producers. The third presents our robust conception of eating local, grounded on a more realistic model that accommodates for heterogeneous and complex actors. (shrink)

In their book Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy: A Public Reason Approach, Matteo Bonotti and Anne Barnhill defend a conception of public reason centred on the notion of accessibility and advance an ethical toolkit public health policy makers can use to ensure they are reasoning publicly when designing healthy eating policies. Finally, they propose to institutionalise the process of public reasoning informed by their ethics framework by designing certain procedures of consultation and deliberation. This article focuses on their institutionalisation (...) and raises some doubts and concerns by arguing that the procedures designed by Bonotti and Barnhill may be counterproductive to some of their aims, in particular with respect to citizens’ control, epistemic injustice, and the conception of citizens as free and equal. (shrink)

Explains the concept and conceptions of public justification found in the philosophy and political theory literatures.

Contemporary philosophers have studied food and its consumption from several disciplinary perspectives, including normative ethics, bioethics, environmental ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and aesthetics. Many questions remain, however, underexplored or unaddressed. It is in the spirit of contributing to fill in these scholarly gaps that we designed the current issue, which represents the first collection of papers dedicated to food from a perspective of analytic metaphysics. Before presenting the five papers published in this issue, we shall briefly frame the current research (...) on food linked to analytic metaphysics and point out future directions of research in this area. We begin with the most basic interroga- tive, namely What is food?, and then offer three illustrations of more specific re- search questions. We hope these examples suffice to demonstrate that food is a fertile terrain of inquiry for analytic metaphysics and that it deserves to be devel- oped. (shrink)