Three Aristotelian Accounts of Disease and Disability
Glackin, Shane N.
Date: 17 March 2015
Article
Journal
Journal of Applied Philosophy
Publisher
Wiley for Society for Applied Philosophy
Publisher DOI
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 paper, I consider several versions of Aristotelian ...
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 paper, 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 challenge – respectively, 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.
Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Item views 0
Full item downloads 0