Georges Canguilhem's Normativist's Perspective to Healthy and Diseased States

Health is a fundamental and irreplaceable value in human life and a substratum to our human existence and daily activities. Whereas other values are contingent and dependent on other higher values, some theorists do agree that health and disease and healthy and diseased states are concepts and statements of values based on our socio-cultural judgments as desirable or abhorrible conditions. Our daily experiences show that some conditions in life are neither biologically diseased, nor could they be explained by biological sciences. Therefore, several theories and theorists have inquired into some deviations, deviant behaviors and abnormalities concerning health, one of which is normativism and Georges Canguilhem respectively. Normativism and its advocates strongly defend that the utilization of the terms, health and disease reflect value judgments in which healthy states are those conditions that we desire, and diseased states, those that we want to avoid. Georges Canguilhem is an advocate of this school. He defends that “normative” in philosophy means every judgment which evaluates or qualifies a fact in relation to a norm, but this mode of judgment is essentially subordinate to that which establishes norm. Since “healthy” and “diseased” states are conditions in life, it can, therefore, be argued rightly that the concepts of health and disease are normative, judged by man in accordance with his standards and preferences. This paper examines Canguilhem’s arguments for health and disease as a judgement of values from the normativists’ perspective. It employed the qualitative method of critical analysis with the appendages of our understanding and use of health and disease as states of our being. The paper discovered that Canguilhem’s normativist position on health centers on value as socio-cultural preference and disease as abhorrible conditions. Normativism is challenged as its weaknesses fail to explain certain deviant behaviors that are neither desirable nor pathological. Normativism is insufficient to solely explain the concepts of heath and disease despite its defense.