Hai Doan

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently initiated “social listening”. The first section of this paper investigates conceptual aspects of social listening. It demonstrates that the WHO’s descriptions of social listening are vague and inconsistent. Notwithstanding this, possibly, the WHO-envisaged social listening is constituted by three core components: (i) listening and monitoring, (ii) understanding, and (iii) engaging and nudging. It follows that there is an inherent relatedness between WHO-envisaged social listening and other “social-listening” activities. It follows that to investigate issues of or related to social listening, the inquiry should be broadened to general practices of “social listening”, and experiences related to these must be considered. In the second section, this paper finds several issues with or related to social listening, including bad faith uses, the difficulty of identifying misinformation and punishing it, the echo chambers problem, issues concerning nudging, concerns about policy preset position, concerns for the management and prioritization of resources, and concerns about overlapping between social listening activities. Thus, social listening should be subject to certain rules. In the third section, this paper argues that social listening should be subject to the precautionary principle. Doan, Nie, and Fenton projected that the central teleology, the purpose, and the modus operandi of the precautionary principle could be identified in various policy and legal instruments and propositions, accordingly, the precautionary principle entails, inter alia, proactive preparation for public health matters, specifically emergencies, and assessment, e.g. risk–benefit analysis, taking into account uncertainty and past experiences. They showed the normative validity and necessity of applying the precautionary principle in its “moderate versions” to public health matters. It follows from this and the rationale underlying and the range of rules of the precautionary principle that the precautionary principle can offer some insights, solutions, and mechanisms to remedy issues posed by or related to social listening.

The first section provides the standard understanding of the concept of ‘đồng bào’ (hereinafter ‘đồng bào’). This understanding is widely shared by the Vietnamese populace for it to stand robustly and independently from any controversies. Then, implications of ‘đồng bào’ for two areas of bioethics—transplantation and ethics in crises—are provided. Finally, ‘đồng bào’ shall be developed for the purpose of global health. In English, ‘fellow citizens’ or ‘compatriots’ are the terms used to describe people of the same ‘community’. ‘Compatriots’ defines the ‘community’ by virtue of soil (its etymology has the Latin term ‘patria’—‘fatherland’). ‘Fellow citizens’ defines the ‘community’ in terms of citizenship and links to the concepts of ‘polis’ or ‘state’. ‘Đồng bào’ is a Vietnamese word conveying the notion of ‘people of the same ‘community’ which occupies a decent position in the Vietnamese public-politic life.1 Though ‘đồng bào’ in Vietnamese is generally considered comparable to, translatable into and has been translated into ‘compatriots’ and ‘fellow citizens’, ‘đồng bào’ neither delineates the ‘community’ in terms of ‘soil’ or ‘citizenship’. ‘Đồng bào’ literally means ‘from the same fetus’ (‘bào’ is ‘bào thai’—fetus). ‘Đồng bào’s’ original metaphorical meaning derives from the Âu Cơ creation myth. The Vietnamese Âu Cơ myth stands out from certain other creation myths because, according to it, people are considered not only to have the same mother but to ‘have been conceived and born simultaneously from one fetus’ as opposed to ‘were born from the same womb’ as in certain other creation myths. People are not only siblings of each other. Rather, people share bones, flesh, blood and a bond forged in the common destiny …

Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have been widely criticized for being too delayed and indecisive. As a result, the precautionary principle has been endorsed, applauded, and proposed to guide future responses to global public health emergencies. Drawing from controversial issues in response to COVID-19, especially in Vietnam, this paper critically discusses some key ethical and legal issues of employing the precautionary principle in public health emergencies. Engaging with discussions concerning this principle, especially in environmental law where the precautionary principle first appeared as a guiding principle with objective content(s), this paper formulates the precautionary principle as ‘in dubio pro salus’, which is about advising, justifying and demanding states to proactively prepare for scenarios arising out of any public health emergency. It distinguishes the precautionary principle into moderate and hard versions. A moderate version largely takes a holistic approach and fulfils a series of criteria specified in this paper, while a hard version either permits restrictive measures to be deployed primarily on a hypothetic basis or expresses an instrumental mentality. The hard version should be rejected because of the ethical and legal problems it raises, including risk-risk tradeoffs, internal paradoxes, unjustified causing of fear and unreasonable presupposition. Ultimately, this paper defends the moderate version.

Human rights constitute a universal concern in different countries’ responses to COVID-19. Vietnam is internationally praised for its success in containing the pandemic; nevertheless, human rights issues are a key area that needs to be assessed and improved. Little legal and ethical research is available on human rights in Vietnam, particularly in its response to COVID-19, however. In Vietnam, decentralization took place during the pandemic: higher authorities delegated power to lower ones to make and implement public health measures. Unfortunately, many measures made and implemented decentrally caused human rights concerns or breaches. This article aims to study what makes such measures cause human rights concerns or breaches. It argues that several social, legal, and political factors, including an inadequate understanding of human rights, the undefined breadth of discretion, and lack of supervision, are underlying factors for such problematic decentralized measures. Accordingly, this paper proposes two solutions (i) improving the supervision of the decentralization process, and (ii) improving the understanding of human rights. While Vietnam should learn from the international community to improve its measures, lessons and experience from Vietnam can also contribute to a richer dialogue and better protection of human rights globally.

Post-mortem reproduction is a complex and contested matter attracting attention from a diverse group of scholars and resulting in various responses from a range of countries. Vietnam has been reluctant to deal directly with this matter and has, accordingly, permitted post-mortem reproduction implicitly. First, by analysing Vietnam’s post-mortem reproduction cases, this paper reflects on the manner in which Vietnamese authorities have handled each case in the context of the contemporary legal framework, and it reveals the moral questions arising therefrom. The article then offers an account of Vietnamese social norms as an explanation for the tendency to conduct post-mortem reproduction. In arguing that a deeper and more thorough examination of the moral and ethical reasoning is required, the paper advocates in favour of supportive post-mortem reproduction regulation. In doing so, the paper seeks to reconcile the Vietnamese legal framework and post-mortem reproduction experiences of other countries. The article concludes that Vietnam and countries sharing the similar cultural traits should permit post-mortem reproduction explicitly. This would require full engagement with the ethical and legal issues arising, and careful promulgation of regulations and guidelines based on comparative experiences of a range of countries in handling this matter.