THE GOVERNMENT AND ETHICS OF HEALTH PROMOTION - THE IMPORTANCE OF FOUCAULT,MICHEL

A debate about the ethics of health promotion recently appeared in thi s journal, While the papers involved provided a number of new insights into this area, they appeared to stop short of many possibilities, In particular, the dismissal of the relevance of the work of Foucault in this area prevented another line of inquiry opening up, This paper pr ovides a fuller explication of Foucault's relevance to ethics and heal th promotion, It draws attention to the way health promotion produces subjects, especially choosing subjects, Using nutrition promotion as a n example, it highlights the way that various positions in health prom otion-which on the surface appear to be at odds with each other-can in fact be seen to be part of the same project: that of producing self-r egulating subjects. The paper concludes by stressing that health promo tion provides an ethics, in a Foucauldian sense, by producing the mean s by which subjects assess their own desires, attitudes and conducts i n relation to those set out by health promotion expertise.