Abstract

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. Professor Cong Yali’s paper precisely describes the central contradiction in contemporary public health ethics, which is related to the difference between individual liberalism and communitarianism. However, it fails to critique the root cause of this contradiction—the modernity that is the basis of public health’s construction. From the perspective of traditional Chinese medicine and philosophy, it is possible to develop a cognitive approach to human public health that is entirely distinct from modernity, thereby providing a more robust justification for the ‘publicness’ of public health ethics.