ABSTRACT
Both research medicine and clinical care aim to improve our health. The pivoting that we see in autism is but one of many examples of how we continually rethink what constitutes a healthy human being. The question of what constitutes health and what constitutes “non-health” affects a wide gamut of social practices from medicine to political rights. A value-laden definition of health might define health in terms of the physiological conditions necessary to deliver something we consider valuable. Cooper’s analysis represents a prime example of a normativist definition of health. Just as the importance of physiological and biological factors in defining health challenge normativism, the ubiquitous presence of values in medicine poses a similar problem for naturalism as well. Likewise, almost everyone experiences deterioration in eyesight, cognitive abilities, and bone health with age. With regards to health and disease, a naturalist might be tempted to map health and diseases onto these objective categories in the world.
