Can ‘harm minimisation’ ever be ethically justified?

Date:

Tue, 21 Mar 2023

Time:

11 am-12pm [Singapore [GMT +8]

Location:

Seminar Room 2, Level 8
Tahir Foundation Building (MD1)
National University of Singapore
12 Science Drive 2, Singapore 117549

Details:

You are cordially invited to the ON-SITE SSHSPH Staff Research Round. We look forward to your attendance and we hope for an interesting discussion.

Refreshments will be provided at 10:30am, do drop by to hang out for a bit before the session starts.

We will also be having a Lucky Draw at the end of the session, register yourself and stand a chance to win a special prize!
*Only Attendees will be included in the Lucky draw*

Abstract:

Harm minimisation (HM) is a key aim of many actual or proposed public health policies (e.g. supply of clean needles/syringes for injecting drug users; drug testing at music festivals; promoting e-cigarettes over burning tobacco etc). In this talk I try and do two things. First, there is conceptual work to do. Can HM be clearly distinguished from related concepts such as harm reduction, harm prevention and harm avoidance etc? I will argue that it is important to be clear about what we are talking about. Second, assuming we have a clear concept of HM, where, if at all, is it justifiable to use it as a policy aim? I will argue that we should not have HM as an overall policy aim, as in at least some cases it makes sense to weigh the chance of harms arising from a policy against other important considerations (such as benefits). It looks as though cases where HM is most plausible as a policy aim are where people are held to be going to act in a harmful way anyway, and we seek to minimise the chances of (preventable) harm arising from such acts. I will explore the nature of this justification in two ways. First, we should note that it takes the form of a conditional, where the antecedent involves an empirical claim which may be contested. Second, it might be argued that HM necessarily involves complicity in harms that it would be better to prevent.

Speakers:

Prof. Angus Dawson
Director, WHO Collaborating Centre for Bioethics,
Centre for Biomedical Ethics (CBmE) NUS

Dr. Angus Dawson is Professor of Bioethics and Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Bioethics based at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics (CBmE) at NUS. He has held previous professorial appointments at the University of Sydney in Australia (2015-2022) and the University of Birmingham in the UK (2011-2015).

His main research interest is in public health ethics. He was the joint founder of the journal Public Health Ethics and has been its joint Editor-in-Chief since it began in 2008. He has been editor or co-editor of six collections of original papers mainly on topics in public health ethics, including Ethics, Prevention, and Public Health (2007), Public Health Ethics: Key Concepts and Issues in Policy and Practice (2011), and Public Health Ethics: Cases Spanning the Globe (2016). The latter collection is available for free and has been downloaded in full or in part nearly a million and a half times.

Angus has been heavily involved in ethics and policy work over the last twenty years with many different committees and organisations, including the World Health Organization, the UK’s Department of Health, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Australian Federal Government, and Médecins Sans Frontières.