Abstract
Obesity has increasingly been identified as a critical global public health concern. This focus on obesity as a health priority raises complex bioethical issues. These include how obesity is defined and categorized, the implications of the centrality of personal responsibility in medical and public health approaches, how competing ethical frames impact social justice concerns, and the growing “moral panic” concerning obesity. A critical examination of how obesity is defined as a medical problem suggests that ethical approaches could be more productive if obesity were addressed as a social problem with medical consequences, rather than emphasizing it as a medical problem with social consequences.
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Further Readings
Brewis, A. (2011b). Obesity: Cultural and biocultural perspectives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Puhl, R. M., & Heuer, C. A. (2009). The stigma of obesity: A review and update. Obesity, 17(5), 941–964.
Saguy, A. (2012). What’s wrong with fat? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Williams, D.L., Brewis, A.A. (2016). Obesity. In: ten Have, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_313
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_313
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