Dr Mary Walker1
1La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia
Biography:
My research is in bioethics, philosophy of medicine, and personal identity. Past work has focused on overdiagnosis, personalised medicine, neurotechnologies, artificial organs, definitions of health and disease, and narrative approaches to understanding persons. She is currently focusing on ethical issues related to drug and alcohol policy.
Abstract:
Drug policies can embody more or less implicit moral judgements that need interrogation, as well as having potentially harmful or unjust consequences. Public debate about particular drug policies remain highly contentious, with continuing disagreement over, for example, the value of harm reduction versus criminalisation. This indicates the importance of assessing drug policies in ethical terms. However, this policy area has been historically highly moralised – that is, heavily influenced by moral views about drug use – raising complex issues about how to disentangle ‘moralising’ from robust ethical debate. This paper develops an approach to these issues using the principle of proportionality to assess drug policies in ethical terms. It first develops an understanding of proportionality drawing on applied and public health ethics discussions to show how proportionality judgements can incorporate both consequentialist and deontological intuitions. I then apply the proportionality principle to assessing particular drug policies, with two aims. The first is descriptive, to show how the approach helps to identify what moral assumptions may be influencing drug policies (particularly consequentialist and deontological intuitions). The second is normative, helping to provide a framework for ethical evaluation of such policies.