Health as an Intermediate End and Primary Social Good

Recent contributions to the journal Public Health Ethics on the role of political theory in public health ethics have advanced certain theses that may lead the discipline toward some theoretical blind alleys. The article critiques positions that downplay or misunderstand the potential of neorepublican understandings of political liberty, or deny the place of population health as a primary good or basic value in the political domain.The article proposes the use of the notion of intermediate human ends or goods for understanding the value of population health for a political society, in supporting the legitimacy of directive public health interventions. It defends the notion of reflective equilibrium against a critique by Stephen R. Latham as playing a prospectively important role in public health ethics, especially if reflective equilibrium is employed as including incompletely theorized mid-level principles. The article concludes by drawing attention to the potential to public health ethics of contemporary understandings of the common good in analytical philosophy.