You may be right–Billy Joel

 

I haven’t been posting much recently on health. I think it might be because I spend the entire rest of my day thinking about health so I’ve been avoiding reading about it in the morning. And today is going to be no different.

Once again, I’ve been dazzled by an article by Massimo Pigliucci. He’s clear concise and to the point. In this article he talks about the ‘third way’, the alternative to moral absolutism (which states that actions are either right or wrong) and moral relativism (which says that we can’t make any cross-cultural pronouncements on what’s right and what’s wrong).  Both clearly have their appeal, we like there to be some overarching moral principles by which we can say that some cultural practices are unquestionably wrong (I think you can probably think of a few on your own) but at the same time, moral absolutism would seem to lead us to make the same kind of mistakes Europeans made during colonialism.

The ‘third way’, or what Pigliucci calls in the end, moral reasonism, is a kind of mixture of both. We have some moral absolutist principles that we have to be open about questioning and revising should the need arise, but we allow some flexibility around the principles to allow for cultural practices. It’s kind of like moral relativism on a leash. But I’m not a philosopher by any stretch of the imagination.

I am interested in the way that this issue resembles how we approach health. What does it mean to be healthy? It took a long time for people to get away from the defining it as simply the absence of disease. The WHO defines it as “complete physical, mental and social wellbeing” but what the hell does that mean? Even if we have difficulty defining what health is, however, there are some people we can compare where it is clear one is healthier than the other. I think, the same is true about ethics. There are some universals that, regardless of culture, we can agree on (although maybe not in the U.S. right now), and moral reasonism would have us build from there.

What am I doing here? I have a feeling I’m in way over my head.