Public health ethics and more-than-human solidarity

Abstract

This article contributes to the literature on One Health and public health ethics by expanding the principle of solidarity. We conceptualize solidarity to encompass not only practices intended to assist other people, but also practices intended to assist non-human others, including animals, plants, or places. To illustrate how manifestations of humanist and more-than-human solidarity may selectively complement one another, or collide, recent responses to Hendra virus in Australia and Rabies virus in Canada serve as case examples. Given that caring relationships are foundational to health promotion, people's efforts to care for nonhuman others are highly relevant to public health, even when these efforts conflict with edicts issued in the name of public health. In its most optimistic explication, One Health aims to attain optimal health for humans, non-human animals and their shared environments. As a field, public health ethics needs to move beyond an exclusive preoccupation with humans, so as to account for moral complexity arising from people's diverse connections with places, plants, and non-human animals.

Culling and the Common Good: Re-evaluating Harms and Benefits under the One Health Paradigm

“…Under these conditions, infection control measures applied to animals are arguably unethical if they are motivated by short-term, partisan (human) gains rather than being directed towards the long-term overall reduction of harm by configuring food and agricultural practices around multispecies collectives that sustain effective infectious disease management. Further work on the relevance and ethical significance of 'shared benefit' approaches Degeling, 2012, Capps andLederman, 2015) and other putative public health principles and values such as solidarity, reciprocity and transparency to OH is needed (Rock and Degeling, 2015). As the case of HPAI illustrates, applying these principles may require a fundamental reconfiguration of how we understand and approach the promotion of interspecies health.…”

“…While such a move could potentially drive us into endless cycles of utilitarian calculus and moral debates as to the respective value of different types of subjectivity, in its very foundations OH explicitly invites interdisciplinary and pluralistic approaches. Drawing on casuistry, the ethical dimensions of OH can be grounded in empirical cases where the focus is on the nature of the dependency, and the distribution of harms and benefits across and between human and non-human populations (Light and McKenna, 2004;Rock and Degeling, 2015). Rather than the harm principle, judgments about the appropriateness of different responses to heightened infectious risk can be based on the consequences of individual actions for the good of the collective-assessed through their impacts on human and non-human health, biodiversity and ecosystem resilience.…”

“…A deeper engagement with ethics might not only have a profound impact on how animal disease control is executed but also how it is perceived. In as much as the normative dimensions of OH can be framed around the promotion of common or universal goods, moving beyond the preserve of human interests requires us to share the risks, burdens and goods of infectious disease control (Rock and Degeling, 2015). Interventions that seek to deliberately exclude humans from burdens or explicitly withhold benefit from nonhuman others, thereby, become ethically problematic.…”

“…In its broadest and most inclusive explication, however, OH aims to attain optimal health for humans, non-human animals and their shared environments. Because human, animal and ecological health are explicitly linked, OH approaches could potentially justify privileging non-human interests with the presumptive aim of promoting mutual benefits to both humans and non-human animals (Capps and Lederman, 2014;Rock and Degeling, 2015). Yet, much of the current scientific discourse and practice that describes itself as OH specifically focuses on pathogen evolution and host-pathogen relationships.…”

Secondary School Students’ Environmental Concerns: a Case Study from Slovenia

“…The importance of these values may differ across persons and cultures, but the structure of these values is believed to be universal [Schwartz 1992]. Rock and Degeling [2015] highlighted the inevitable tension between concern for health of individual, population, species and/or biosphere. They introduced the term "more-than-human solidarity" which implies people respecting (valuing) commitments to one another as well as to places, plants and non-human animal, because people are not concerned for fellow humans in isolation from non-human animals, nor from places, nor are people necessarily more concerned about fellow humans than about non-human species, individual animals, particular places, or multi-species collectives.…”