Constant, I would say that objective illness is just as problematic as objective morality; it’s just less obviously problematic because in everyday contexts, we’re more used to dealing with disputes about morality than about illness. You mention that “if we select an ill partner for producing offspring we may produce no offspring,” and in an evolutionary context, probably we could give some fitness-based account of illness. However, this evolutionary concept of “illness” cannot be the ordinary meaning of the word, because no one actually cares about fitness.
I hate to use this example (“gender is the mind-killer,” as we learned here so recently), but it’s a classic one and a good one, so I’ll just go ahead. Take homosexuality. It’s often considered a mental disorder, but if someone is gay and happy being so, I would challenge (as evil, even) any attempt to define them as “ill” in anything more than the irrelevant evolutionary sense. I would indeed go much further and say that (for adults, at least) that which the patient desires in herself is health, and that which the patient does not desire in herself is sickness. (I actually seem to remember a similar viewpoint being advanced on The Distributed Republic a while back.) But this only puts us back at discussing preferences and morality.
Constant, I would say that objective illness is just as problematic as objective morality; it’s just less obviously problematic because in everyday contexts, we’re more used to dealing with disputes about morality than about illness. You mention that “if we select an ill partner for producing offspring we may produce no offspring,” and in an evolutionary context, probably we could give some fitness-based account of illness. However, this evolutionary concept of “illness” cannot be the ordinary meaning of the word, because no one actually cares about fitness.
I hate to use this example (“gender is the mind-killer,” as we learned here so recently), but it’s a classic one and a good one, so I’ll just go ahead. Take homosexuality. It’s often considered a mental disorder, but if someone is gay and happy being so, I would challenge (as evil, even) any attempt to define them as “ill” in anything more than the irrelevant evolutionary sense. I would indeed go much further and say that (for adults, at least) that which the patient desires in herself is health, and that which the patient does not desire in herself is sickness. (I actually seem to remember a similar viewpoint being advanced on The Distributed Republic a while back.) But this only puts us back at discussing preferences and morality.