 Many real-world challenges in public health ethics require both the justice and the legitimacy standpoints in order to provide an adequate analysis of what is morally at stake. For instance, one way to interpret challenges to New York’s soda tax is that the state lacked the right to interfere with individual choice by imposing a tax, or that such a tax was objectionable because it rested on a contentious view about the disvalue of soft drinks. However, that framing is ethically incomplete without also addressing whether the regressive character of the tax meant that the costs of its attendant public health benefits would be borne disproportionately by subgroups in the population who are already disadvantaged in ways that cannot be justified.