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SUMMARY:Health and disease: beyond naturalism and normativism - Ellie King
 ma (King's College London)
DTSTART:20101111T163000Z
DTEND:20101111T180000Z
UID:TALK26658@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Nicky Reeves
DESCRIPTION:What is health? What is disease? Thirty years of philosophical
  debate has failed to answer these questions. Instead the literature has r
 evolved around one single question: are the concepts of health and disease
  value-free? Naturalists ardently argue in favour\, whilst normativists eq
 ually vehemently oppose. Neither of these approaches has succeeded\, howev
 er\; naturalists fail to make good on their promise of providing a fully n
 aturalistic account of disease – and even if they were able to provide t
 his\, the disease concept they discuss is a pure theoretical one\, and not
  applicable to either practice\, ethics or policy. Normativists\, on the o
 ther hand\, fail to unpack the claim that health and disease are value-lad
 en\, and offer analyses that beg the question with respect to applications
  in policy\, ethics and practice. It is time for a different approach. Rat
 her than debating value-free or value-laden definitions we should consider
  how the concepts of health and disease came to be what they are. In this 
 process both values and biological descriptions play an interactive role. 
 The creative synthesis of naturalism and normativism I thus offer moves be
 yond the traditional stalemate\, and has profound implications for bioethi
 cist.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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