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Document Details : Title: Using Social Ontology for Improving Healthy Eating Policy Author(s): PIRAS, Nicola Journal: Ethical Perspectives Volume: 31 Issue: 1 Date: 2024 Pages: 29-44 DOI: 10.2143/EP.31.1.3293469 Abstract : There is increasing awareness in Western societies on how diets and foods can influence human health. This has prompted a lively discussion on healthy eating policies among scholars, lay people, and policymakers on the opportunity for the state to intervene in private aspects of citizens’ lives, such as their eating behaviours and food choice. Barnhill and Bonotti, following up on this ongoing debate, propose a new foundation for healthy eating policies based on public reasons. This approach grounds public efforts and interventions on reasons that citizens could understand and accept, at least to some extent of idealization. The purpose of this paper is to expand the work by Barnhill and Bonotti by introducing two additional tools borrowed from social ontology, which may be useful for policy makers. The first tool is what I call ontological targeting. It aims to determine the entity that should be targeted by Barnhill and Bonotti’s ethical framework, e.g., a diet, a particular food, or a macronutrient (II). The second tool is social pressure analysis, which can assist policymakers in evaluating how social groups can influence individual eating behaviours (III). In the final section of the paper, I will provide a brief example illustrating how these two tools can be used to provide greater insights for policy makers (IV). |
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