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

Abstract

Sander Werkhoven’s ‘A Dispositional Theory of Health’ is an important and original contribution to debates about the disease concept, which persuasively demonstrates that dispositions must play some role in a full account of what it is to be healthy or ill. Unfortunately, as a theory, it cannot as it stands be correct. I first demonstrate what appears to be a significant, and possibly fatal, flaw; the proliferation of dispositions which Werkhoven’s theory requires makes impossible, at least in the absence of significant further metaphysical work, the comparative numerical judgements on which its account of health and illness are based. I then demonstrate two further problems, concerning the exclusion of ‘technological’ dispositions from those under consideration, and a large class of compensatory biological functions which Werkhoven’s theory seems to have overlooked.