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The third 2023 issue of Tijdschrift voor Gezondheidszorg en Ethiek (TGE) was recently released. This issue focuses on the ethics of lifestyle and prevention. Topics include lifestyle care as religion, can a sugar tax be justified, and do you actually have a "right" to unhealthy behavior? The articles in the issue focus on what ethics of health promotion should be about and who to involve in it.
In an article on lifestyle care, the author shows how health appears sacred in lifestyle care and is surrounded by technologically supported rituals around exercise, sleep, eating and drinking. Lifestyle care, in line with the Alles is gezondheid credo, thereby colonizes virtually all of life and thus takes away the view of other values.
Freedom is one of the values that can come under pressure in the process. In a subsequent article, the author examines the extent to which introduction of the sugar tax, as included in the 2022 coalition agreement, limits citizens' individual freedom of choice and how this can be justified using the freedom approaches of John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin.
A different approach can be read in the third editorial, in which the authors argue for a public ethics that takes citizens' multifarious experiments seriously and reflects on the implicit norms in those practices. They envision an ethics that learns from the public places where citizens, professionals and policymakers work to create caring environments, social inclusion and encounters across social boundaries.
Would you like to know more? Read more in the Editorial by editor-in-chief Dr. Gert Olthuis (IQ Health) and co-editor Dr. Donald van Tol, and check out the issue's Table of Contents. All can be found on the TGE website.