Making road safety moral – a brief history of arguing about seatbelts, helmets, and drunk-driving in Britain

October 17th, 2024 12-13h00 PM EST

Hybrid - Room 1140, 11th floor, 2001 McGill College or on ZOOM

Speaker Biography:

Janet Weston is an Associate Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Director of the LSHTM Centre for History in Public Health. Her research interests include histories of psychiatry and mental health, HIV/AIDS, prison healthcare, and health law, and her most recent book Looking after Miss Alexander: care, mental capacity, and the Court of Protection in mid-twentieth-century England came out last year with McGill-Queens University Press and received the 2024 J. Willard Hurst prize honorable mention. Her current research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, explores twentieth century public health law in Britain and also aims to develop better connections between the humanities and public health.

Abstract:

In this talk, Professor Westin will discuss how and why road safety came to be seen as a ‘public health’ issue in Britain from the 1960s onwards, and the associated battle that took place concerning the morality of legislating about seatbelts, motorcycle helmets, and drunk-driving. The debates surrounding these innovations make up a valuable case study that demonstrates the role of morality within public health. As she will show, processes of moralization in relation to road safety were operating in several different ways: in the identification of the ‘public health problem;’ in the framing of opposition to new legislation on the basis of individual freedom; and in the arguments that road safety advocates then formulated to infuse decisions about road-related behaviours with moral weight, expanding the parameters of moral responsibility. Professor Weston will conclude with a few reflections on how this might inform debates and decisions surrounding public health law today.