Means, ends and the ethics of fear-based public health campaigns
R Bayer, AL Fairchild - Journal of medical ethics, 2016 - jme.bmj.com
Controversy has swirled over the past three decades about the ethics of fear-based public
health campaigns. The HIV/AIDS epidemic provided a context in which advocacy groups
were almost uniformly hostile to any use of fear, arguing that it was inherently stigmatising
and always backfired. Although this argument was often accepted within public health
circles, surprisingly, the bioethicists who first grappled with this issue in terms of autonomy
and coercion in the 1980s were not single-minded: fear could be autonomy-enhancing. But …
health campaigns. The HIV/AIDS epidemic provided a context in which advocacy groups
were almost uniformly hostile to any use of fear, arguing that it was inherently stigmatising
and always backfired. Although this argument was often accepted within public health
circles, surprisingly, the bioethicists who first grappled with this issue in terms of autonomy
and coercion in the 1980s were not single-minded: fear could be autonomy-enhancing. But …
