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In 2015, Rand Paul generated controversy by insisting that parents should have complete discretion over whether to vaccinate their children. When pressed to come up with a defense for this policy, Paul replied, "The state doesn't own your children. Parents own the children, and it is an issue of freedom and public health." His rationale for his policy proposal and the responses to it hint at several fundamental questions about the role of the State as it pertains to producing health, as well as more practically oriented questions concerning policy. In this seminar, we will consider both sorts of questions. We will consider the merits of and objections to various policies such as cigarette bans, mandatory seatbelt or helmet laws for motorists, taxes for sugary beverages, and prohibitions of the private sale of organs. We will also ask more philosophical questions: When discussing public health, what constitutes 'the public’? And how should we connect public health and policy measures to salient concepts such as legitimacy, justice, coercion, manipulation, paternalism, autonomy, liberty, privacy, and parental rights? In asking these questions, both at the level of policy and more philosophically, we will engage with a variety of political theories, including various strands of feminism, anarchism, libertarianism, perfectionism, critical race theory, leftist theories, broadly consequentialist theories, and public reason liberalism. Must have some background in philosophy or bioethics.