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Reframing Health Ethics to Support Liberation
Thankfully, most people want to be good. We want to be good at our jobs and we want to be ethical people. Phew.
Any healthcare professional will tell you our first duty is the ethical injunction Do No Harm.
Even so, despite best intentions, we’ve been getting it very wrong. That’s because we’re using reductionist science. This scientific thinking understands phenomena by dissecting them and then reflects this — unhelpfully — in its ethical codes.
Social change needs a unified approach to science where we understand phenomena through interconnection. This — relational — shift opens up a widely different scientific and ethical imagination sparking the radical break we need for liberation.
How Reductionism Leads to Healthism and Why That Matters
Reductionist science hides the way power shapes health and gives rise to an ideology called healthism.
Healthism teaches that health is mainly about personal responsibility. It’s a set of beliefs that sees health as an outcome of lifestyle, and the healthcare system.
Good healthcare for all is worth fighting for and should be available by right, not privilege. But good healthcare for all, miraculously achieved without any other dramatic change, will not make much of a dent in…
