Health, disease, and persons

well-being in a post-modern world

Tristram Engelhardt

pp. 147-163

in: Paulina Taboada, Kateryna Fedoryka, Patricia Donohue-White (eds), Person, society and value, Berlin, Springer, 2002

Abstrakt

There is no generic human well-being. All actual human well-being has content and is specific. This is the case because well-being is contextual and there are numerous contexts within which human well-being can be defined. This is also the case because well-being must be specified in terms of a particular content-full understanding of values or human flourishing. To talk concretely of well-being is to specify a context and to accent some values over others, to endorse certain notions of appropriate human projects over others. Because there are divergent contexts within which to understand human well-being and because there are diverse accounts, understandings, and rankings of values and of appropriate human projects, a scrutiny of notions of health and disease reveals that they are in the plural.¹ There are numerous competing accounts of the good life and of human flourishing. This plurality is reflected in the numerous understandings and construals of health and disease.² The role of culture-dependent values in these differences is accented when particular understandings of disease and health are incorporated with health-care systems that must inevitably embody decisions as to what states of affairs should be the focus of appropriate medical concern and medical treatment.³ The framing of an all-encompassing societal health care system inevitably discloses tensions among competing accounts of health and disease.