We live in racist societies where hate and xenophobia flourish and where politicians demonise migrant communities. Those lives seem as distant from the concerns of medicine and public health as they can possibly be. ![]() But the scaffold of knowledge that epidemiology provides is just that-a skeleton on which must be draped garments of truth about the lives people live today. Epidemiology is indeed the basic science of health. Meanwhile, the science of public health has shrouded itself within the worm-eaten veneer of a medical model of disease that has long failed to meet the objectives of equity and justice. Having sacrificed moral authority, they capitulated to government emoluments. In return, public health leaders have accepted government patronage. They have traded their critical perspective for collusion with a state whose coercive policies have abjured all notions of the right to health. ![]() They have become the actuaries of efficiency, the accountants of decline. For example, during recent decades, public health practitioners have been co-opted by government into guiding service provision in increasingly bankrupt health systems. The motives of social and political reform that once animated medicine and public health have been lost, forgotten, or deliberately erased. Preoccupied as they are with the conventional causes and determinants of disease, broader political influences shaping health have been neglected, even ignored. Medicine and public health have so far failed to meet these growing challenges. Now is an important moment to recommit ourselves professionally and politically-across the entire spectrum of medicine and public health-to defeat the insidious social pathologies of hate, racism, xenophobia, and terror. ![]() Health professionals, together with medical and public health scientists, have an important part to play in addressing these dangers through their work and values-peace, equity, solidarity, diversity, community, and social justice. Deaths indirectly by a structurally racist society that creates unsafe, isolated, and abandoned ethnic enclaves. Deaths directly from premeditated violence. Our societies are struggling to find solutions to these threats-threats that are causing deaths with increased frequency. The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific.The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia.The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology. ![]() Their biggest difference concerns the relationship between freedom and nature, and there is a further difference between Pettit’s (ahistorical) idea of the concept-dependence of freedom, and the Hegelian (historical) idea of the conception-dependence of freedom. Hegelian views converge with Pettit’s on non-domination and recognition, although their comprehensive theories of freedom are based on radically different metaphysics. For example, the republican ideal of non-domination can be understood in light of the Hegelian structure of ‘being at one with oneself (beisichsein) in another’. They both also hold that relations to others, relations of recognition, are in various ways directly constitutive of freedom, and in different ways enabling conditions of freedom. Both share the key insight that characterizes the tradition of republicanism from the Ancients to Rousseau: to be subordinated to the will of particular others is to be unfree. This paper compares Philip Pettit’s account of freedom to Hegelian ones.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |