Three Aristotelian Accounts of Disease and Disability

Abstract

The question of whether medical and psychiatric judgements involve a normative or evaluative component has been a source of wide and vehement disagreement. But among those who think such a component is involved, there is considerable further disagreement as to its nature. In this article, I consider several versions of Aristotelian normativism, as propounded by Christopher Megone, Michael Thompson and Philippa Foot, and Martha Nussbaum.The first two, I claim, can be persuasively rebutted by different modes of liberal pluralist challengerespectively, pluralism about structures of social organisation and pluralism about biological forms. Nussbaum's version, by contrast, is alert to the need for pluralism; I argue, however, that the Aristotelian aspects of her theory hamper her pursuit of those pluralistic aims.

Species Natures: A Critique of Neo-Aristotelian Ethics

“…Atran 1990;Atran et al 1997;Gelman and Hirschfeld 1999). Even if Foot and Thompson are right that we conceive of species as having natures of a neo-Aristotelian sort, work on folk essentialism gives no reason to think there are any facts about these natures (Glackin 2016). These considerations do not address what is probably the most compelling positive argument in favour of the neo-Aristotelian position.…”

Philosophy of psychiatry: theoretical advances and clinical implications

“…They are grounded in the experiences of distress, disability and disruption, which are interpreted to indicate that something has gone wrong and which lead patients to seek professional help for their problems. From a normativist perspective, medicine is at its core a practical activity aimed at reducing human suffering and enhancing well-being 36,41,42 .…”

“…"Healthiness", for example, may reflect a range of related features, presumably underpinned by relevant biological processes 180 . However, if we think back to normativist positions on the definition of mental disorder, which emphasize the influence of social and cultural values, different societies and cultures may have different understandings of mental disorder because they value different conceptions of human flourishing 42 .…”

Infinity, Technology, Degeneracy: A Note on Werkhoven’s Dispositional Theory of Health

“…One problem here involves the idea-which I think survives Werkhoven's denial that his view requires essentialism about species-that there is some determinate way for the members of a species or reference class to be that is appropriate to use as a measure for all of them; this is again not unique to Werkhoven's theory, and has been previously criticized in the literature (see, for example, Lewens [2010]; Glackin [2016]). Another potential issue is that dispositions seem to exist whether or not the relevant environmental triggers do-the brittle window-pane has the disposition to be broken by stray footballs even in possible worlds where footballs have not been invented-meaning that the set of dispositions an organism possesses is plausibly unaffected by the state of the technology which might cause them to be realized.…”