The Being and Value of Health
The principle aim of this thesis is to provide an account of the nature of
health. The starting-point is that health is a normative concept: health
implies a standard or norm in relation to which an organism's state is
evaluated. Many philosophers take this to imply that health must be
defined in subjective terms. They either think health consists in a certain
type of subjective experience (e.g. Canguilhem, Fulford), or that health
is relative to subjective values and goals (e.g. Nietzsche, Korsgaard,
Nordenfelt). I argue that subjective definitions of health fail to capture
the essential properties of health and attempt to show that health is
something normative and yet entirely objective. This would imply that
there are normative facts in the world, and to support this claim I turn
to debates in contemporary meta-ethics. I develop a meta-ethical theory
according to which a subset of non-moral goods is grounded in
objective features of living beings, and argue that this meta-ethical
theory opens the possibility for an objective account of health.
I then proceed to develop a theory of health that aims to capture
what it means for any living to be healthy. I argue that the concept of
health latches onto organisms' capacities (or dispositions): the greater an
organism's range of capacities (or quantity of dispositions), i.e. the more
it is capable of doing, the healthier it is. The norm relative to which an
organism's range of capacities is measured in evaluations of health, I go
on to argue, is the maximum range of capacities possible for the species.
Accordingly, an organism is healthy if it is capable of performing all
species-specific activities. A closer analysis of this claim yields the
formal definition that health consists in a multiplicity of potential
activity vis- -vis factual limitations set by the species. This definition of
health is defended against various objections and potential counter-
examples. In the context of human health, I attempt to show this
definition of health captures both physical and mental dimensions of
health; that it establishes a direct link between health and individual
autonomy; and that it supports a Nietzschean account of 'the great
health'-the idea that being able to give up the concern for one's health
constitutes a superior kind of health. In the conclusions, I reflect on
whether this conception of health could function as an ethical ideal, and
consider the form that a health-based ethics could take.
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