Taking sociology seriously: a new approach to the bioethical problems of infectious disease

After a history of neglect, bioethicists have recently turned their attention to the topic of infectious disease. In this paper we link bioethicists’ earlier neglect of infectious disease to their under‐appreciation of the extent to which the problem of infectious disease is related to social factors and thus to questions of justice. We argue that a social causation of illness model – well‐known to sociologists of medicine, but incompletely understood by bioethicists – will improve future bioethical analysis of issues related to infectious disease. By emphasising the relationships between social and economic structures of inequality and health, the social causation model provides a richer approach to ethical issues associated with infectious disease than the more commonly used biomedical model.