Monash Bioethics Review - Call for Papers SI: Coercing for Public Health: (When) is coercion ethically justified?

Guest co-editors: Guest co-editors: Jonathan Shaffer, Tess Johnson

Rationale and Description

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic points to the urgency of understanding the relationship between coercion and care in public health. Medical and policy developments over the past few years–practices like mass viral testing, COVID-19 vaccination, widespread lockdowns and quarantine regulations–raise important questions about the meaning and ethics of coercion in public health. Research on coercion thus far has been insufficiently informed by ethical, sociological and historical analyses (Emanuel et al. 2022). While coercion, quarantine, and the 'police powers' of public health (Richards and Rathbun 1999) have a long history, there is now widespread experience of coercive public health policy and practice, globally.

 Yet, there is still a lack of consensus on when (if ever) coercion in public health policy is ethically acceptable. There is also little translational work that links conceptual analyses of coercion and sociological and philosophical work on state legitimacy with policymaking. Past attempts at bioethical translational work – for instance, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics explored coercive public health policy in 2007 - were heavily criticised. There has been too little evaluation both of the ethical concepts that might justify coercive public health policies and of when such concepts might apply and what their limitations may be.

To produce an effective normative analysis that is also useful to public health policymakers, conceptual work must be complemented and informed by qualitative data on the experiences of those living in these contexts and facing coercion as a result of public health policies. This intersection between bioethics and health sociology and anthropology is fruitful ground for discussion of the limitations to the ethical concepts that might be used to justify coercion.

Call for Papers

For this special issue we seek papers that explore the concept of coercion from a number of perspectives: bioethical, sociological, anthropological, and related. Papers could focus on the normative dimensions of concepts of coercion, restriction, biopower, care, and burden; explain the literature of coercion in bioethics and policy; or ethically analyse historical or contemporary national and international coercive policies and programs.

Possible questions to motivate papers include:

What exactly is coercion in public health practice and how does it vary in social understanding, experience, and legitimacy?When, if ever, is coercion in public health policy and practice in response to infectious disease outbreaks acceptable?How are forms of coercion in public health bound up with conceptions of social care?How is coercion experienced differently by coerced individuals or groups in different historical and contemporary, national and international contexts, and how might this affect the ethical acceptability of coercive public health policies?

The deadline for manuscript submissions is October 15th, 2023. Blinded manuscripts of up to 10,000 words (or as few as 2,000 words) should be submitted via the Monash Bioethics Review editorial manager system here: https://www.editorialmanager.com/mobr/default2.aspx (this opens in a new tab)

All manuscripts should be indicated as submissions to the special issue on “Coercing for Public Health”.

For any queries surrounding the relevance of a prospective article to the special issue, please contact the guest editors at jshaff18@jhu.edu (this opens in a new tab)

Citations:

Emanuel, E., Upshur, R., and Smith, M. (2022). “What covid has taught the world about ethics,” New England Journal of Medicine, 387: 1542-1545.

Nuffield Council on Bioethics. (2007). Public Health: Ethical Issues. London, UK: Nuffield Council on Bioethics.

Richards, E. P., and Rathbun, K. C. (1999). “The Role of the Police Power in 21st Century Public Health:” Sexually Transmitted Diseases 26, no. 6: 350–57.