The Principle Of Reponsibility: Ethical Research On Public Health

The principle of. responsibility is an urgent developing perspective for public health ethics research. The theory essence and the basic mission of public health ethics are analyzed starting from the principle of responsibility. On the basis, the author has explored the ethical conflicts and moral problems which asise from the process that the government, the enterprise, the media, the public health professionals, the individuals and the internarional community protect public health.Public health is a community health problem which can not be resolved until the whole society participates extensively. Public health ethics is a kind of value principles and action rules to protect public health, which is developing from the research and the practice of public health because of the expansion of public health practice, the conflict of value orientations between public health ethics and bioethics, the retardation to public health of liberalist right language.Public health ethics is a kind of responsibility ethics, which has provided paradigm for analyzing the ethical issues of public health. Confirming moral responsibility is the basic mission of public health ethics. It is the precondition of the performing the moral responsibility to explain the genesis foundation, the performance route and the evaluation criteria of moral responsibility.It is the public responsibility of the whole society to protect public health. Confirming moral responsibility is the fulfillment of the public responsibility.It is a basic duty of the government to protect public health. The government should carry out the maximization of the public health interest, the welfarism of public health services and the equalization of public health level. The morbidity, mortality and the average life expectancy of population is not only a concrete measure of the level of public health, but also a quantitative evaluation of governmental responsibility. People's satisfaction is the practice basis to evaluate the government's responsibility. The full-scale and free development of everyone is the highest standards to evaluate the Government's responsibilities for public health.Production and business activities of enterprises and public health are closely linked. Protection of public health is an important social responsibility of enterprise. The absence of moral responsibility of enterprise includes man-made counterfeit products, ignoring production safety and sacrificing the environment for economic development,and so on. Money worship has resulted in the absence of moral responsibility of enterprise, which seriously threatens public health. The enterprises can not go out from the trap of money worship until they have established the correct concept of money, profit outlook and the view of exchange.Media is a kind of key instrument of public opinion which educates the mass and reflects the public's view on behalf of the public interest. The media is a disseminator of public health knowledge, a disseminator and supervisor of public health policy, a reporter of public health incidents from the media's social responsibility.It is desecration of their own social responsibility to seek sealing fee, communicate false health information and manufacture consumption of worship. The media should strengthen moral self-discipline and undertake the social responsibility for health communication and supervision of public opinion.Public health professionals include policymakers, practitioners and researchers. They are professionals who are engaged in management, service and research of public health. In the process of maintaining public health, public health professionals confronnt a series of ethical conflicts which include the conflict between paternalism intervention and individual autonomy, the conflict between professional responsibility and their own health, the conflict between science spirit and authority worship. Public health professionals should earnestly perform their professional responsibility and wholeheartedly serve the public to deal with these conflicts.The civil responsibility consciousness is an urgent need to safeguard public health. From the perspective of preventive medicine, many public health problems are related to civil actions,such as the spread of infectious diseases, the formation of lifestyle diseases, the deterioration of sanitation, and so on.It primarily depends on civic responsibility consciousness to eliminate the adverse effects of civic behavior on public health because the citizen have great freedom within the scope permitted by law. Cultivation of public reason is a guarantee of the civil responsibility consciousness.The global public health is related to the sustainable development of mankind as a whole. In the context of globalization, the population health of different countries and different regions has become more and more an interactive and indivisible whole so that it is the public responsibility of international community to protect the global public health.The global problems call for the ethical consensus that represent global interests. These ethical consensus include the benefit view of globalism, the development concept of man-centeredness and the view of harmonious coexistence between the nature and mankind, which are very essential to deal with global public health risks and ethical conflicts.