| While the virtues, or ideal character traits, of a physician are well established as a cornerstone of medical ethics, the focus in public health has been on policy and practice, not on professionalism. In this dissertation I focus on the contributions that a virtue ethics approach can make to discourse in public health ethics. The central points of my dissertation include (1) an aretaic concern with balancing self- and other-concern can help resist oversimplifying public health problems in terms of conflicts between group interests and individual rights (2) the virtue of trustworthiness suggests trust as an alternative to paternalistic relationships in public health practice, (3) the language of courage and its associated vices is sometimes latent in public health risk discourse, and (4) the notion of harmartia, or "missing the mark" can shed light on current debates regarding the scope of public health as a discipline. I consider it to be an advantage of virtue ethics that it connects what public health professionals ought to do with what kind of life professionals want to live, or who they want public health professionals to become. By speaking to the professional identity of public health workers, my contribution to ethics of public health helps to address the concern that the profession currently lacks a coherent normative foundation. My primary aim throughout this project is to demonstrate how virtues create a standard of excellence that professionals can aspire to attain. |
