AG Heinzelmann, 17.01.2025 What does it mean to be healthy? It’s complicated…

What does it mean for an organism to be healthy? Over the past five decades, philosophers of medicine and medical professionals have engaged in considerable debate regarding the definition of “health.” Traditionally, there have been two main positions: 1.) negativism, which defines health as the absence of disease; and 2.) positivism claims that health is the presence of some additional positive state or ability. It has been pointed out that the debate has reached somewhat of a stalemate and that there has been little to no progress with traditional philosophical methods, such as conceptual analysis, explicature, and the method of cases. In addition, the concept of health might be in flux and subject to change, and different groups of speakers may mean different things when they call someone or something healthy. In reaction to the methodological challenge, some scholars have suggested supplementing our traditional toolkit with empirical methods to make progress. Some first empirical investigations already suggest that the term health is strongly associated with leading a healthy lifestyle – an understanding that is orthogonal to both negativism and positivism.

In this talk, I present a systematic, experimental investigation into the folk concept of health. Data from four experimental studies suggest that neither negativism nor positivism is correct – and also the newly-established lifestyle view does not get it entirely right. Instead, the folk concept of health seems to have multiple senses, one of which is related to the absence of diseases, the other to leading a healthy lifestyle. What unites these different senses is that “being  healthy” is not an objective fact, but a highly evaluative judgment. These findings challenge traditional definitions of health and raise a series of practical issues: How can we make sure that philosophers of medicine, medical professionals and ordinary people speak the same language when they talk about health?

Dr. Pascale Willemsen is an SNSF Ambizione Research Fellow and Principal Investigator of the research group “Investigating Thick Ethical Concepts — Philosophical and Empirical Perspectives” (InTEC) at the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on moral philosophy, metaethics, moral psychology, and experimental philosophy. She has extensively studied the attribution of moral responsibility, particularly the role of causal judgments. Currently, her work centers on thick ethical concepts, exploring their impact on metaethical debates and how normativity is expressed in ordinary language. Her research is published in Philosophical Studies and Synthese.

Note that talks (but not Q+A) may be recorded.