Health as the functional underpinnings of agency

Abstract: This paper addresses the question of why health is good for you by developing a novel account of health. I thereby prioritize the question of health’s value over that of its definition. This inverts the priority that has been traditional, but that tradition has led to inadequate accounts of health’s value and stalled debate on its definition. I begin by briefly reviewing, from my own work elsewhere, several desiderata for an answer to why health is good for you and why familiar answers have failed to meet these desiderata. In the bulk of the paper, I develop my original account according to which an individual’s occurrent health-state consists in those functional states of their organism performing at those levels of functional efficiency such that make the individual the agent she is. On this view, then, health is good for you because agency is. I distinguish this account from past proposals of health as a kind of ability. I, then, distinguish between the functional underpinnings of mere agency and the functional underpinnings of the individual’s current (or recent) state of comparative agential excellence. I argue that the former threshold takes normative priority but the latter allows for clinically relevant comparisons of health-states over time and against heuristic benchmarks. I argue that therapeutic medicine is properly aimed at restoring and preventing the loss of those functional states constitutive of the individual’s current agential abilities. Lastly, I raise and respond to several objections.