Welcome
Public health is concerned primarily with the promotion of health at the level of communities or the public. Yet, the pursuit of public health often involves placing burdens on individuals, including infringement on individual preferences, interests, and life plans. It is not always clear, then, how the aggregate benefits at which public health policy aims will promote, cohere with, or stand in tension with constitutive aspects of individual flourishing, including subjective and objective assessments of how well one’s life is going, individual development of one’s life plans and capabilities, and relationships and responsibilities toward others within one’s community. For public health policy to be responsive to the well-being of individuals without forgoing its commitment to promoting the public’s health, consideration should be given to the nature and constitutive aspects of human flourishing. This course will examine such philosophical, psychological, ethical, and policy questions from diverse historical and contemporary perspectives, and it will consider whether such perspectives actually do, and ought to, inform the development of public health policy and interventions.
