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Biological normativity: a new hope for naturalism?

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Abstract

Since Boorse [Philos Sci 44(4):542–573, 1977] published his paper “Health as a theoretical concept” one of the most lively debates within philosophy of medicine has been on the question of whether health and disease are in some sense ‘objective’ and ‘value-free’ or ‘subjective’ and ‘value-laden’. Due to the apparent ‘failure’ of pure naturalist, constructivist, or normativist accounts, much in the recent literature has appealed to more conciliatory approaches or so-called ‘hybrid accounts’ of health and disease. A recent paper by Matthewson and Griffiths [J Med Philos 42(4):447–466, 2017], however, may bear the seeds for the revival of purely naturalist approach to health and disease. In this paper, I defend their idea of Biological Normativity against recent criticism by Schwartz [J Med Philos Forum Bioethics Philos Med 42(4):485–502, 2017] and hope to help it flower into a revival of naturalist approaches in the philosophy of medicine.

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Notes

  1. See the Preamble of World Health Organization (2020).

  2. Though he appears to have changed his mind on this in later publications (Boorse 1997, 2014).

  3. As she met an unfortunate demise due to a lengthy struggle with cancer in May 2020, I very much dedicate this paper to her and her project for the naturalization of norms. I encourage a reading of Hill and Pavese (2020) for a tribute to and excellent overview of Neander and her work.

  4. Though I prefer the label anti-naturalists for the latter group. In Veit (2020c), I take this approach further and offer a purely naturalist account of healt, disease, and pathology.

  5. Canguilhem’s fate in the philosophy of medicine is in many ways an unfortunate one, since many of its current debates have already been discussed by Canguilhem and I may add in a better form than today. Unlike other glorified spearheads for new philosophical disciplines such as David Hull in the philosophy of biology or Daniel Hausman in the philosophy of economics, Canguilhem appears to be continuously underappreciated—a fate that is probably owed to his placement in the continental tradition.

  6. Recently, philosophers have argued that we can and should explicitly explore the phenomenology or subjective experience of health and suffering in non-human animals which gets us somewhat closer to Canguilhem’s aspirations yet remains fairly within a naturalist framework (see Browning 2018, 2019a, b, c, 2020a, b; Browning and Veit 2020).

  7. See for instance Millikan (1984, 1989, 1995) and Veit (2019a).

  8. See Low et al. (2012) and Gluckman et al. (2005)).

  9. Which is perhaps unsurprising given Griffiths’ previous endorsement of the view (1993, p. 410), in addition to the fact that two of Matthewson’s supervisors have argued for it (Godfrey-Smith 1993, p. 200; Maclaurin and Sterelny 2008, p. 114).

  10. A naturalist may very well see these different ways of going wrong as useful perspectives or models of a single phenomena in nature, without having to give up on the reality of phenomena, in which case pluralism should face even less resistance (Veit and Browning 2020; Veit 2019b, c, 2020a, b forthcoming).

  11. In the case of mental disorders such autism we may be more reluctant to admit a naturalist interpretation though there is likewise room for both facts and values to play a role in classification (Chapman 2020; Chapman and Veit 2020a, b).

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Funding

This research was in part supported through an Australian Laureate Fellowship Project: “A Philosophy of Medicine for the 21st Century” (Ref. FL170100160).

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    Walter Veit

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Veit, W. Biological normativity: a new hope for naturalism?. Med Health Care and Philos 24, 291–301 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-020-09993-w

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