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  1. Towards a dispositionalist (and unifying) account of addiction.Robert M. Kelly - 2023 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 44 (1):21-40.
    Addiction theorists have often utilized the metaphor of the blind men and the elephant to illustrate the complex nature of addiction and the varied methodological approaches to studying it. A common purported upshot is skeptical in nature: due to these complexities, it is not possible to offer a unifying account of addiction. I think that this is a mistake. The elephant is real–there is a _there_ there. Here, I defend a dispositionalist account of addiction as _the systematic disposition to fail (...)
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  • Is Health the Absence of Disease?Somogy Varga & Andrew J. Latham - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    While philosophical questions about health and disease have attracted much attention in recent decades, and while opinions are divided on most issues, influential accounts seem to embrace negativism about health, according to which health is the absence of disease. Some subscribe to unrestricted negativism, which claims that negativism applies not only to the concepts of health and disease as used by healthcare professionals but also to the lay concept that underpins everyday thinking. Whether people conceptualize health in this manner has (...)
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  • What is Mental Health and Disorder? Philosophical Implications from Lay Judgments.Somogy Varga & Andrew J. Latham - 2024 - Synthese (5).
    How do people understand the concepts of mental health and disorder? The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of several factors on people’s judgments about whether a condition constitutes a mental disorder or a healthy state. Specifically, this study examines the impact of the source of the condition, its outcome, individual valuation (i.e., the value the individual attaches to the condition), and group valuation (i.e., the value the relevant group attaches to the condition). While we find that (...)
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  • Is pregnancy a disease? A normative approach.Anna Smajdor & Joona Räsänen - forthcoming - Journal of Medical Ethics.
    In this paper, we identify some key features of what makes something a disease, and consider whether these apply to pregnancy. We argue that there are some compelling grounds for regarding pregnancy as a disease. Like a disease, pregnancy affects the health of the pregnant person, causing a range of symptoms from discomfort to death. Like a disease, pregnancy can be treated medically. Like a disease, pregnancy is caused by a pathogen, an external organism invading the host’s body. Like a (...)
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  • Health, Disease, and the Medicalization of Low Sexual Desire: A Vignette-Based Experimental Study.Somogy Varga, Andrew J. Latham & Jacob Stegenga - forthcoming - Ergo.
    Debates about the genuine disease status of controversial diseases rely on intuitions about a range of factors. Adopting tools from experimental philosophy, this paper explores some of the factors that influence judgments about whether low sexual desire should be considered a disease and whether it should be medically treated. Drawing in part on some assumptions underpinning a divide in the literature between viewing low sexual desire as a genuine disease and seeing it as improperly medicalized, we investigate whether health and (...)
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  • Medical Disorder Is Not a Black Box Essentialist Concept.Harriet Fagerberg - 2023 - Philosophy of Medicine 4 (1).
    Defining Mental Disorder: Jerome Wakefield and His Critics, edited by Denis Forest and Luc Faucher, is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of medicine whose work is informed by that of Jerome Wakefield, or the disease debate in general. If you are anything like me, this book will open the door to a new depth of understanding of the harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA) and its methodical underpinnings, and an enriched appreciation of what is at stake in defining medical (...)
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  • Reconceptualizar los trastornos de personalidad.Diego Becerra - 2022 - Culturas Cientificas 3 (2):36-65.
    El concepto de trastorno mental permite justificar intervenciones médicas, psicológicas y judiciales. Además, facilita a la/el consultante acceder a tratamientos mediante reembolsos o programas de salud pública, y por otro lado, podría conllevar estereotipos sociales. No obstante, el significado de dicho concepto no ha dejado de suscitar debate. En el presente artículo argumentaré que los trastornos de personalidad, tal como son definidos en el DSM-5, no cumplen con los criterios de patología de las propuestas principales (i.e. teoría bio-estadística de la (...)
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  • Critique and Refinement of the Wakefieldian Concept of Disorder: An Improvement of the Harmful Dysfunction Analysis.Emmanuel Smith - 2022 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (4):530-539.
    One way in which bioethicists can benefit the medical community is by clarifying the concept of disorder. Since insurance companies refer to the DSM for whether a patient should receive assistance, one must consider the consequences of one’s concept of disorder for who should be provided with care. I offer a refinement of Jerome Wakefield’s hybrid concept of disorder, the harmful dysfunction analysis. I criticize both the factual component and the value component of Wakefield’s account and suggest how they might (...)
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  • (1 other version)Against the generalised theory of function.Harriet Fagerberg - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (4):1-25.
    Justin Garson has recently advanced a Generalised Selected Effects Theory of biological proper function. According to Garson, his theory spells trouble for the Dysfunction Account of Disorder. This paper argues that Garson’s critique of the Dysfunction Account from the Generalised Theory fails, and that we should reject the Generalised Theory outright. I first show that the Generalised Theory does not, as Garson asserts, imply that neurally selected disorders are not dysfunctional. Rather, it implies that they are both functional and dysfunctional. (...)
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  • Naturalism, Disease, and Levels of Functional Description.Somogy Varga & David Miguel Gray - 2022 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (3):482-493.
    The paper engages Christopher Boorse’s Bio-Statistical Theory (BST). In its current form, BST runs into a significant challenge. For BST to account for its central tenet—that lower-level part-dysfunction is sufficient for higher-level pathology—it must provide criteria for how to decide which lower-level parts are the ones to be analyzed for health or pathology. As BST is a naturalistic theory, such choices must be based solely on naturalistic considerations. An argument is provided to show that, if BST is to be preserved, (...)
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  • Understanding Addiction.Robert M. Kelly - 2021 - Dissertation, University at Buffalo
    The addiction literature is fraught with conceptual confusions, stalled debates, and an unfortunate lack of clear and careful attempts to delineate the phenomenon of addiction in a way that might lead to consensus. My dissertation has two overarching aims, one metaphysical and one practical. -/- The first aim is to defend an account of addiction as the systematic disposition to fail to control one’s desires to engage in certain types of behaviors. I defend the inclusion of desires and impaired control (...)
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  • Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of disorder and the problem of defining harm to nonsentient organisms.Antoine C. Dussault - 2021 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 42 (5):211-231.
    This paper criticizes Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of disorder by arguing that the conceptual linkage it establishes between the medical concepts of health and disorder and the prudential notions of well-being and harm makes the account inapplicable to nonsentient organisms, such as plants, fungi, and many invertebrate animals. Drawing on a previous formulation of this criticism by Christopher Boorse, and noting that Wakefield could avoid it if he adopted a partly biofunction-based account of interests like that often advocated in (...)
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  • Why Mental Disorders are not Like Software Bugs.Harriet Fagerberg - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (4):661-682.
    According to the Argument for Autonomous Mental Disorder, mental disorder can occur in the absence of brain disorder, just as software problems can occur in the absence of hardware problems in a computer. This article argues that the AAMD is unsound. I begin by introducing the “natural dysfunction analysis” of disorder, before outlining the AAMD. I then analyze the necessary conditions for realizer autonomous dysfunction. Building on this, I show that software functions disassociate from hardware functions in a way that (...)
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  • The concept of disease in the time of COVID-19.Maria Cristina Amoretti & Elisabetta Lalumera - 2020 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 41 (5):203-221.
    Philosophers of medicine have formulated different accounts of the concept of disease. Which concept of disease one assumes has implications for what conditions count as diseases and, by extension, who may be regarded as having a disease and for who may be accorded the social privileges and personal responsibilities associated with being sick. In this article, we consider an ideal diagnostic test for coronavirus disease 2019 infection with respect to four groups of people—positive and asymptomatic; positive and symptomatic; negative; and (...)
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  • The harm of medical disorder as harm in the damage sense.David G. Limbaugh - 2019 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 40 (1):1-19.
    Jerome Wakefield has argued that a disorder is a harmful dysfunction. This paper develops how Wakefield should construe harmful in his harmful dysfunction analysis. Recently, Neil Feit has argued that classic puzzles involved in analyzing harm render Wakefield’s HDA better off without harm as a necessary condition. Whether or not one conceives of harm as comparative or non-comparative, the concern is that the HDA forces people to classify as mere dysfunction what they know to be a disorder. For instance, one (...)
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  • Is Infertility a Disease and Does It Matter?Hane Htut Maung - 2018 - Bioethics 33 (1):43-53.
    Claims about whether or not infertility is a disease are sometimes invoked to defend or criticize the provision of state-funded treatment for infertility. In this paper, I suggest that this strategy is problematic. By exploring infertility through key approaches to disease in the philosophy of medicine, I show that there are deep theoretical disagreements regarding what subtypes of infertility qualify as diseases. Given that infertility's disease status remains unclear, one cannot uncontroversially justify or undermine its claim to medical treatment by (...)
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  • Harm and the concept of medical disorder.Neil Feit - 2017 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38 (5):367-385.
    According to Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of medical disorder, the inability of some internal part or mechanism to perform its natural function is necessary, but not sufficient, for disorder. HDA also requires that the part dysfunction be harmful to the individual. I consider several problems for HDA’s harm criterion in this article. Other accounts on which harm is necessary for disorder will suffer from all or almost all of these problems. Comparative accounts of harm imply that one is harmed (...)
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  • Autism and ‘disease’: The semantics of an ill-posed question.Christopher Mole - 2017 - Philosophical Psychology 30 (8):1126-1140.
    It often seems incorrect to say that psychiatric conditions are diseases, and equally incorrect to say that they are not. This results in what would seem to be an unsatisfactory stalemate. The present essay examines the considerations that have brought us to such a stalemate in our discussions of autism. It argues that the stalemate in this particular case is a reflection of the fact that we need to find the logical space for a position that rejects both positive and (...)
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  • Addiction and the Concept of Disorder, Part 1: Why Addiction is a Medical Disorder.C. Wakefield Jerome - 2016 - Neuroethics 10 (1):39-53.
    In this two-part analysis, I analyze Marc Lewis’s arguments against the brain-disease view of substance addiction and for a developmental-learning approach that demedicalizes addiction. I focus especially on the question of whether addiction is a medical disorder. Addiction is currently classified as a medical disorder in DSM-5 and ICD-10. It is further labeled a brain disease by NIDA, based on observed brain changes in addicts that are interpreted as brain damage. Lewis argues that the changes result instead from normal neuroplasticity (...)
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  • Wakefield’s Harm-Based Critique of the Biostatistical Theory.Christopher Boorse - 2024 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 49 (4):367-388.
    Jerome Wakefield criticizes my biostatistical analysis of the pathological—as statistically subnormal biological part-functional ability relative to species, sex, and age—for its lack of a harm clause. He first charges me with ignoring two general distinctions: biological versus medical pathology, and disease of a part versus disease of a whole organism. He then offers 10 counterexamples that, he says, are harmless dysfunctions but not medical disorders. Wakefield ends by arguing that we need a harm clause to explain American psychiatry’s 1973 decision (...)
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  • Psychopathology and Metaphysics: Can One Be a Realist About Mental Disorder?Simoni Iliadi - 2024 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 49 (3):283-297.
    Metaphysical realism about mental disorder is the thesis that mental disorder exists mind-independently. There are two ways to challenge metaphysical realism about mental disorder. The first is by denying that mental disorder exists. The second is by denying that mental disorder exists mind-independently. Or, differently put, by arguing that mental disorder is mind-dependent. The aim of this paper is three-fold: (a) to examine three ways in which mental disorder can be said to be mind-dependent (namely, by being causally dependent on (...)
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  • Bioethics and the Contours of Autonomy.Derek Estes - 2022 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (4):495-502.
    The principle of respect for autonomy often dominates the bioethical discourse. Yet despite its prominence, the exact contours are not always well defined. Widespread disagreement about the nature of autonomy has led some to conclude that autonomy is hopelessly vague and therefore ought to be abandoned in contemporary bioethics. Despite calls to move beyond it, autonomy remains at the center of bioethical reflection. The challenge, then, if autonomy is to function as a bedrock of contemporary bioethics, is to define more (...)
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  • A clarification on the Boorse–Wakefield debate about health: Is the theoretical/therapeutic distinction dispensable?Antoine C. Dussault - 2022 - Analysis 82 (4):673-681.
    Although Boorse’s and Wakefield’s accounts of health are generally regarded as competing ones, they are in fact so only if they are aimed at the same concept. Some remarks made by Boorse and Wakefield, however, leave it unclear whether they are. On one possible interpretation, Boorse’s account aims at analysing a theoreticalconcept of abnormality, which ought to be distinguished from a more clinicalor therapeuticconcept, whereas Wakefield’s account aims at analysing a clinicalor therapeuticconcept. The debate between Boorse and Wakefield would then (...)
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  • New Approach to Disease, Risk, and Boundaries Based on Emergent Probability.Patrick Daly - 2022 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (3):457-481.
    The status of risk factors and disease remains a disputed question in the theory and practice of medicine and healthcare, and so does the related question of delineating disease boundaries. I present a framework based on Bernard Lonergan’s account of emergent probability for differentiating (1) generically distinct levels of systematic function within organisms and between organisms and their environments and (2) the methods of functional, genetic, and statistical investigation. I then argue on this basis that it is possible to understand (...)
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  • Rehabilitating Disease: Function, Value, and Objectivity in Medicine.Russell Powell & Eric Scarffe - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (5):1168-1178.
    The concept of disease remains hotly contested. In light of problems with existing accounts, some theorists argue that the disease concept ought to be eliminated. We answer this skeptical challenge by reframing the discussion in terms of the role that the disease concept plays in the complex network of health-care institutions in which it is deployed. We argue that while prevailing accounts do not suffer from the particular defects that critics have identified, they do suffer from other deficits, and this (...)
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  • The Ends of Medicine and the Experience of Patients.D. Robert MacDougall - 2020 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 45 (2):129-144.
    The ends of medicine are sometimes construed simply as promotion of health, treatment and prevention of disease, and alleviation of pain. Practitioners might agree that this simple formulation captures much of what medical practice is about. But while the ends of medicine may seem simple or even obvious, the essays in this issue demonstrate the wide variety of philosophical questions and issues associated with the ends of medicine. They raise questions about how to characterize terms like “health” and “disease”; whether (...)
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  • Normality in medicine: a critical review.Marisa Catita, Artur Águas & Pedro Morgado - 2020 - Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine 15 (1):1-6.
    What is considered normal determines clinical practice in medicine and has implications at an individual level, doctor-patient relationship and health care policies. With the increase in medical information and technical abilities it is urgent to have a clear concept of normality in medicine so that crucial discussions can be held with unequivocal terms.The different meanings for normality were analyzed throughout the literature and grouped according to their relevance in the academic community in models, namely the Biostatistical Theory (BST), Health, Ideal, (...)
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  • Medical disorder, harm, and damage.Neil Feit - 2020 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 41 (1):39-52.
    Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of medical disorder is an influential hybrid of naturalist and normative theories. In order to conclude that a condition is a disorder, according to the HDA, one must determine both that it results from a failure of a physical or psychological mechanism to perform its natural function and that it is harmful. In a recent issue of this journal, I argued that the HDA entails implausible judgments about which disorders there are and how they are (...)
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  • (1 other version)Defining disease in the context of overdiagnosis.Mary Jean Walker & Wendy Rogers - 2017 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 20 (2):269-280.
    Recently, concerns have been raised about the phenomenon of ‘overdiagnosis’, the diagnosis of a condition that is not causing harm, and will not come to cause harm. Along with practical, ethical, and scientific questions, overdiagnosis raises questions about our concept of disease. In this paper, we analyse overdiagnosis as an epistemic problem and show how it challenges many existing accounts of disease. In particular, it raises ques- tions about conceptual links drawn between disease and dysfunction, harm, and risk. We argue (...)
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  • Reconsidering harm in psychiatric manuals within an explicationist framework.Mia Biturajac & Marko Jurjako - 2022 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 25:239–249.
    The notion of harm has been a recurring and a significant notion in the characterization of mental disorder. It is present in eminent diagnostic manuals such as DSM and ICD, as well as in the discussion on mental disorders in philosophy of psychiatry. Recent demotion of harm in the definition of mental disorders in DSM-5 shows a general trend towards reducing the significance of harm when thinking about the nature of mental disorders. In this paper, we defend the relevance of (...)
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  • The harmful-dysfunction account of disorder, individual versus social values, and the interpersonal variability of harm challenge.Antoine C. Dussault - 2021 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 24 (3):453-467.
    This paper presents the interpersonal variability of harm challenge to Jerome Wakefield’s harmful-dysfunction account (HDA) of disorder. This challenge stems from the seeming fact that what promotes well-being or is harmful to someone varies much more across individuals than what is intuitively healthy or disordered. This makes it at least prima facie difficult to see how judgments about health and disorder could, as harm-requiring accounts of disorder like the HDA maintain, be based on, or closely linked to, judgments about well-being (...)
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  • Addiction and the Concept of Disorder, Part 2: Is every Mental Disorder a Brain Disorder?Jerome C. Wakefield - 2016 - Neuroethics 10 (1):55-67.
    In this two-part analysis, I analyze Marc Lewis’s arguments against the brain-disease view of substance addiction and for a developmental-learning approach that demedicalizes addiction. I focus especially on the question of whether addiction is a medical disorder. In Part 1, I argued that, even if one accepts Lewis’s critique of the brain evidence presented for the brain-disease view, his arguments fail to establish that addiction is not a disorder. Relying on my harmful dysfunction analysis of disorder, I defended the view (...)
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  • What we argue about when we argue about disease.Harriet Fagerberg - 2023 - Philosophy of Medicine 4 (1):1-20.
    The disease debate in philosophy of medicine has traditionally been billed as a debate over the correct conceptual analysis of the term “disease.” This paper argues that although the debate’s participants overwhelmingly claim to be in the business of conceptual analysis, they do not tend to argue as if this is the case. In particular, they often show a puzzling disregard for key parameters such as precise terminology, linguistic community, and actual usage. This prima facie strange feature of the debate (...)
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  • Pathology as Reduced Efficiency : A Dispositional Approach.Amanda Thorell - 2021 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 40 (1):111-131.
    This paper deals with the idea that ‘pathology’ can be defined in terms of reduced efficiency. I discuss the notion of efficiency in Boorse’s biostatistical theory and Hausman’s functional efficiency theory and argue that whereas Boorse does not provide a precise definition, Hausman’s definition is not suitable to apply in health evaluations. I then propose a precise definition of ‘efficiency’ and illustrate its use in health evaluations. I also show how the suggested definition contributes to solving Kingma’s dilemma.
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  • A New Approach to Defining Disease.Mary Jean Walker & Wendy A. Rogers - 2018 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 43 (4):402-420.
    In this paper, we examine recent critiques of the debate about defining disease, which claim that its use of conceptual analysis embeds the problematic assumption that the concept is classically structured. These critiques suggest, instead, developing plural stipulative definitions. Although we substantially agree with these critiques, we resist their implication that no general definition of “disease” is possible. We offer an alternative, inductive argument that disease cannot be classically defined and that the best explanation for this is that the concept (...)
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  • (1 other version)The overdiagnosis of what? On the relationship between the concepts of overdiagnosis, disease, and diagnosis.Bjørn Hofmann - 2017 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 20 (4):453-464.
    Overdiagnosis and disease are related concepts. Widened conceptions of disease increase overdiagnosis and vice versa. This is partly because there is a close and complex relationship between disease and overdiagnosis. In order to address the problems with overdiagnosis, we may benefit from a closer understanding this relationship. Accordingly, the objective of this article is to elucidate the relationship between disease and overdiagnosis. To do so, the article starts with scrutinizing how overdiagnosis can explain the expansion of the concept of disease. (...)
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  • Why It (Also) Matters What Infectious Disease Epidemiologists Call “Disease”.David Stoellger - 2023 - Philosophy of Medicine 4 (1).
    Infectious diseases figure prominently as (counter)examples in debates on how to conceptualize “disease.” But crucial epidemiological distinctions are often not heeded in the debate, and pathological and clinical perspectives focusing on individual patients are favored at the expense of perspectives from epidemiology focusing on populations. In clarifying epidemiological concepts, this paper highlights the distinct contributions infectious disease epidemiology can make to the conception of “disease,” and the fact that this is at least tacitly recognized by medical personnel and philosophers. Crucially, (...)
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  • The Quantitative Problem for Theories of Dysfunction and Disease.Thomas Schramme - 2021 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 17 (2):(SI7)5-30.
    Mnoge biološke funkcije dopuštaju stupnjevanje. Na primjer, lučenje određenog hormona u organizmu može biti na višoj ili nižoj razini, u usporedbi s istim organizmom drugom prilikom ili u usporedbi s drugim organizmima. Koje razine funkcioniranja predstavljaju slučajeve disfunkcije; gdje da povučemo crtu? To je kvantitativni problem za teorije disfunkcije i bolesti. Cilj mi je braniti verziju bioloških teorija disfunkcije kako bih se uhvatio u koštac s ovim problemom. Međutim, također ću dopustiti da evaluativna razmatranja uđu u teoriju bolesti. Moj argument (...)
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  • Current Dilemmas in Defining the Boundaries of Disease.Jenny Doust, Mary Jean Walker & Wendy A. Rogers - 2017 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42 (4):350-366.
    Boorse’s biostatistical theory states that diseases should be defined in ways that reflect disturbances of biological function and that are objective and value free. We use three examples from contemporary medicine that demonstrate the complex issues that arise when defining the boundaries of disease: polycystic ovary syndrome, chronic kidney disease, and myocardial infarction. We argue that the biostatistical theory fails to provide sufficient guidance on where the boundaries of disease should be drawn, contains ambiguities relating to choice of reference class, (...)
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  • Pathologizing Ugliness: A Conceptual Analysis of the Naturalist and Normativist Claims in “Aesthetic Pathology”.Yves Saint James Aquino - 2022 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (6):735-748.
    Pathologizing ugliness refers to the use of disease language and medical processes to foster and support the claim that undesirable features are pathological conditions requiring medical or surgical intervention. Primarily situated in cosmetic surgery, the practice appeals to the concept of “aesthetic pathology”, which is a medical designation for features that deviate from some designated aesthetic norms. This article offers a two-pronged conceptual analysis of aesthetic pathology. First, I argue that three sets of claims, derived from normativist and naturalistic accounts (...)
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  • Does the harm component of the harmful dysfunction analysis need rethinking?: Reply to Powell and Scarffe.Jerome C. Wakefield & Jordan A. Conrad - 2019 - Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (9):594-596.
    In ‘Rethinking Disease’, Powell and Scarffe1 propose what in effect is a modification of Jerome Wakefield’s2 3 harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA) of medical (including mental) disorder. The HDA maintains that ‘disorder’ (or ‘disease’ in Powell and Scarffe’s terminology) is a hybrid factual and value concept requiring that a biological dysfunction, understood as a failure of some feature to perform a naturally selected function, causes harm to the individual as evaluated by social values. Powell and Scarffe accept both the HDA’s evolutionary (...)
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  • Conceptual Clarity in Clinical Bioethical Analysis.J. Clint Parker - 2020 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 45 (1):1-15.
    Conceptual clarity is essential when engaging in dialogue to avoid unnecessary disagreement and to promote mutual understanding. In this issue devoted to clinical bioethics, the authors exemplify the virtue of careful conceptual analysis as they explore complex clinical questions regarding the essential nature of medicine, the boundaries of killing and letting die, the meaning of irreversibility in definitions of death, the argument for a right to try experimental medications, the ethical borders in complex medical billing, and the definition and modeling (...)
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  • Rethinking “Disease”: a fresh diagnosis and a new philosophical treatment.Russell Powell & Eric Scarffe - 2019 - Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (9):579-588.
    Despite several decades of debate, the concept of disease remains hotly contested. The debate is typically cast as one between naturalism and normativism, with a hybrid view that combines elements of each staked out in between. In light of a number of widely discussed problems with existing accounts, some theorists argue that the concept of disease is beyond repair and thus recommend eliminating it in a wide range of practical medical contexts. Any attempt to reframe the ‘disease’ discussion should answer (...)
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  • The value-ladenness of psychopathy.Marko Jurjako & Luca Malatesti - 2021 - In Luca Malatesti, John McMillan & Predrag Šustar (eds.), Psychopathy: Its Uses, Validity and Status. Cham: Springer. pp. 215-233.
    The recurring claim that the construct of psychopathy is value laden often is not qualified in enough detail. The chapters in this part of the volume, instead, investigate in depth the role and significance of values in different aspects of the construct of psychopathy. Following these chapters, but also by offering a background to them, we show how certain values are involved in the characterisation of psychopathy, inform societal needs satisfied by this construct, and have a central role in determining (...)
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  • How to Draw the Line Between Health and Disease? Start with Suffering.Bjørn Hofmann - 2021 - Health Care Analysis 29 (2):127-143.
    How can we draw the line between health and disease? This crucial question of demarcation has immense practical implications and has troubled scholars for ages. The question will be addressed in three steps. First, I will present an important contribution by Rogers and Walker who argue forcefully that no line can be drawn between health and disease. However, a closer analysis of their argument reveals that a line-drawing problem for disease-related features does not necessarily imply a line-drawing problem for disease (...)
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  • Christopher Boorse and the Philosophy of Medicine.Thomas Schramme - 2014 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 39 (6):565-571.
    In 2012, the symposium "Christopher Boorse and the Philosophy of Medicine" was held at the University of Hamburg. The initial ideas presented at this event, which celebrated Chris's contribution to the development of what is now a vibrant area of research, especially to the theory of disease, form the core of the papers published in this issue. Similarly to what Robert Nozick once said about John Rawls's work, it can be demanded that philosophers of medicine must now either work within (...)
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  • Harm should not be a necessary criterion for mental disorder: some reflections on the DSM-5 definition of mental disorder.Maria Cristina Amoretti & Elisabetta Lalumera - 2019 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 40 (4):321-337.
    The general definition of mental disorder stated in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders seems to identify a mental disorder with a harmful dysfunction. However, the presence of distress or disability, which may be bracketed as the presence of harm, is taken to be merely usual, and thus not a necessary requirement: a mental disorder can be diagnosed as such even if there is no harm at all. In this paper, we focus on the (...)
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  • Can the Harmful Dysfunction Analysis Explain Why Addiction is a Medical Disorder?: Reply to Marc Lewis.Jerome C. Wakefield - 2017 - Neuroethics 10 (2):313-317.
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