Quarantine, isolation and the duty of easy rescue in public health

Giubilini, Alberto; Douglas, Thomas; Maslen, Hannah; Savulescu, Julian

Moreover, because states have a duty to protect public health as well as national and human security, they have an at least prima facie duty to implement coercive and compulsory measures when these are necessary to protect public health and human and national security. The central question of this paper is whether the simple appeal to such a duty of the state represents the strongest justification possible for implementing coercive and compulsory measures. Our answer will be that it does not, and that this duty of the state needs a further argument in its support in order to yield the strongest justification possible for coercive and compulsory state interventions in public health. Before explaining why the simple appeal to the duty of the state does not provide the strongest justification possible, and what type of consideration needs to be added in order to have such a justification, it will be useful to introduce, in the next section, one ethical theory that can provide a moral justification for the duty to implement coercion and compulsion in public health, namely a constrained form of consequentialism.