Who gets to decide what it means to live a healthy lifestyle, and how important a healthy lifestyle is to a good life? As more governments make preventing obesity and diet-related illness a priority, it's become more important to consider the ethics and acceptability of their efforts. When it comes to laws and policies that promote healthy eating--such as special taxes on sugary drinks and the banning of food deemed unhealthy--critics argue that these policies are paternalistic, and that they limit individual autonomy over food choices. In Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy: A Public Reason Approach, Anne Barnhill and Matteo Bonotti show that both paternalistic justifications for healthy eating efforts and anti-paternalistic arguments against them can be grounded in perfectionist views that overly prioritize some values over others. The authors therefore propose a more inclusive, public reason approach to healthy eating policy that will be appealing to those who take pluralism and cultural diversity seriously, by providing a framework through which different kinds of values, including but not limited to autonomy and health, can be factored into the public justification for healthy eating efforts. Additionally, the book adopts a 'farm to fork' approach to the ethics of healthy eating efforts: it engages with theories and debates in political philosophy, considers the implications of different theoretical positions for healthy eating efforts, and then develops a concrete tool for assessing policies that will be of interest to both scholars and policymakers. As well as offering a novel normative analysis of healthy eating policy, the authors offer a new theoretical framework that will be applicable to a wide range of public policy scenarios.

About the Author
Anne Barnhill, Ph.D. is Core Faculty at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. Dr. Barnhill is a philosopher and bioethicist whose research centers on the ethics of influence, the ethics of public health, the ethics of food, and agricultural policy. Dr. Barnhill is the co-editor of Digital Contact Tracing for Pandemic Response: Ethics and Governance Guidance, The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics (OUP, 2018), and Food, Ethics and Society: An Introductory Text (OUP, 2016). Matteo Bonotti, Ph. D. is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Monash University. His research interests include food justice, linguistic justice, democratic theory, political liberalism, the normative dimensions of partisanship and electoral design, and free speech. His work has appeared in such journals as the American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, Political Studies, the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Law and Philosophy, and the European Journal of Political Theory. Dr. Bonotti is the author of Partisanship and Political Liberalism in Diverse Societies (OUP, 2017) and the co-author of Recovering Civility during COVID-19 (2021).

Reviews
What Anne Barnhill and Matteo Bonotti make painfully clear is that establishing a public reason mandate for a health intervention is not easy and takes time. That's why a louder national conversation about our food system is so urgent. * Julian Baggini, Times Literary Supplement *
This book is refreshingly nonideological about the enterprise of trying to get people to eat and drink in healthier ways...Anyone interested in healthy eating policies would learn much from this book. * T. M. Wilkinson, University of Auckland, Ethics *
Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy is an excellent book that will be valuable to academics and students from a range of disciplines. It has the potential to impact food policy for the better if read by policymakers, and we have every reason to think it might be. * Josh Milburn, Food Ethics *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190937881
Author Anne Barnhill
Format Hardback
Page Count 264
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 517g
Dimensions(mm) 163mm * 240mm * 24mm