 Many writers in public health ethics are concerned to integrate both standpoints in their analyses of specific issues in public health policy that, like the soda tax example, importantly engage them both. However, because many debates within public health ethics are located in one standpoint or the other, we distinguish them in this entry. Before taking up these different debates, Section 1 articulates two distinctive features of public health that give shape to public health ethics and help to distinguish it from other areas of inquiry in bioethics, especially the ethics of clinical practice. The first and perhaps most defining of these two features is that public health is committed to advancing the health of collectives, and not the health of individuals. Much of Section 1 is taken up with several conceptual and ethics questions that emerge from this feature. The second distinctive feature of public health introduced in Section 1 is the prominent role that government action and government power play in the promotion of public health.