The borders of health promotion--a response to Nordenfelt.

Nordenfelt has presented a very useful philosophical analysis of the nature and ethics of health promotion. The first section of this paper is a response to the starting point of that analysis--the equation of health promotion with health promotion action. It is argued that this starting point leads to a serious ambiguity, and that this ambiguity is characteristic of other writing about health promotion, including that of the WHO. The second section of this paper explores the implications of this ambiguity, as it appears in the wider health promotion literature, for drawing the borders of health promotion.