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Journal of Bioethical Inquiry
Published in: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 3/2023

Open Access 02-06-2023 | Environmental Medicine | Critical Perspectives

Supporting One Health for Pandemic Prevention: The Need for Ethical Innovation

Authors: Elena R. Diller, Laura Williamson

Published in: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry | Issue 3/2023

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Abstract

Bioethics is a field in which innovation is required to help prevent and respond to zoonotic diseases with the potential to cause epidemics and pandemics. Some of the developments necessary to fight pandemics, such as COVID-19 vaccines, require public debate on the benefits and risks of individual choice versus responsibility to society. While these debates are necessary, a more fundamental ethical innovation to rebalance human, animal, and environmental interests is also needed. One Health (OH) can be characterized as a strategy that recognizes and promotes the synergy between human, animal, and environmental health. Yet, despite the recognition that these entities are interdependent, there is a pronounced inequality in the power relations between human, non-human animal, and the environmental interests which threatens the well-being of all. Until OH can ensure the moral status of animals and the environment and thereby the equal consideration of these interests, it will struggle to protect non-human interests and, as a result, human health. To create a sustainable health system requires a renewed concept of justice that is ecocentric in nature and an application of OH that is flexible and responsive to different ethical interests (e.g., person-centred care and physician responsibilities). Ultimately, to save themselves, humans must now think beyond themselves. Bioethics must assume a key role in supporting the developments required to create and maintain relationships able to sustain environmental and human health.
Footnotes
1
In making an argument to protect the moral statuses of non-human animals and the environment, we assume that these species have moral status to some degree. To fully define the moral status of any given species requires a complex conversation debating the grounds of moral status, which is outside the scope of this paper. However, we offer a brief discussion on the moral status of non-human species in our section, “Justice in One Health,” to acknowledge the importance of this philosophical work both on its own and with respect to employing a One Health strategy.
 
2
We offer the Intuitive Equality Argument (Rowlands 1997) and the applications of the Difference Principle by Keliris-Thomas (2016) and Bell (2004) as further arguments for the inclusion of animals and the environment.
 
3
We acknowledge that achieving a truly neutral position will be difficult so long as humans are the arbitrators of their own justice, and indeed there is no other species which can assume this role. We also recognize that the institutions which utilize One Health as a strategy have their own agenda, which may overlap with what is moral to varying degrees. However, those applying the One Health strategy already share the belief that interdependence of humans, non-human animals, and the environment is key to a universal and sustainable health. It is our hope that this paper further elucidates a practical ethical framework which can be applied as part of the One Health strategy to global health’s most pressing issues.
 
4
Although we acknowledge that certain health organizations have policies endorsing disease control or eradication of farmed animals through measures like culling, the moral status of a species is determined not solely by its role to humans (i.e., farmed animals for meat vs wildlife to watch) but rather through a complex conversation about the grounds of moral status. This conversation includes at least in part an assessment of the species’ rights, interests, capabilities, capacities, and relationships to others. Thus, in this paper, we do not distinguish between bioethical approaches to various species, such as farmed animals versus wild animals, regarding One Health.
 
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Metadata
Title
Supporting One Health for Pandemic Prevention: The Need for Ethical Innovation
Authors
Elena R. Diller
Laura Williamson
Publication date
02-06-2023
Publisher
Springer Nature Singapore
Published in
Journal of Bioethical Inquiry / Issue 3/2023
Print ISSN: 1176-7529
Electronic ISSN: 1872-4353
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-023-10264-5

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