ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 offers a (pluralistic) overarching concept of health: health as a life course trajectory of complete well-being in social context. The metaphysical and epistemic significance of “health” and “disease” remain a point of debate in the philosophy of medicine literature. I argue for one particular specification of the World Health Organization definition of health, combining it with life course theory to yield health as a lifelong complete physical, mental, and social well-being. After offering my new health concept as a slight variation on the WHO concept, I argue that the concept, health as a life course trajectory of complete well-being in social context, strikes the right balance between empirically informed specificity and pluralism. As illustrated in the preceding chapter, health is deeply social and hence socially contingent. This concept of health insists that health cannot be adequately understood as a phenomenon that exists at a single moment in time, but it necessarily refrains from dictating to any population what it means to have complete well-being. This final point is demonstrated in the chapter’s case study, on efforts to promote the health of Aboriginal Australians and efforts within the context of colonial settler–indigenous power dynamics.
