 Communities, self-causation and the natural lotteryErich H. Loewy Social Science & Medicine, 1988, vol. 26, issue 11, 1133-1139 Abstract: This paper examines the various notions of community, and of the 'natural lottery' as well as investigating the role that 'self-causation' plays in communal obligations. In examining community, two opposing views are juxtaposed: (1) the view that community consists merely of persons united by duties of refraining from harm one to another, resulting in autonomy based justice which makes freedom an absolute condition of morality; and (2) a broader view which sees the concept of community as entailing obligations of beneficence, resulting in beneficence based justice and which, therefore, sees freedom as a value to be cautiously traded with other values. In examining the 'natural lottery' in the light of community, the various consequences of viewing the lottery in various ways and the impact that our view of community has on these consequences, is explored. A third option, the option that the 'natural lottery' as the cause of illness and health is a shaky concept, is offered. Self-causation of illness and its linkage to concepts of community and of the 'natural lottery' is then briefly examined. It is concluded that (1) community implies a social contract which, in order to be conceived in the first place, necessitates more than a minimalist ethic: to come about, a degree of beneficence inspiring trust is presupposed; (2) conceiving community narrowly is neither what we ordinarily do when we think of the term nor, for that matter, workable in our world; (3) thinking of the 'natural lottery' as the main determinant of health or disease can be shown to be false: in our world, disease is, to a large degree at least, a social construct; and (4) blaming self-causation for many of today's illnesses has superficial merit but causation is far too complex to permit such a simplistic notion practical application (except, perhaps, that substances known to cause excess harm might be taxed and the tax used for health purposes). The paper concludes by affirming that obligations of care for the welfare of all members of the community (regardless of their contribution to their own misfortune), far more than duties of simply refraining from harm one to another, enables communities to survive. Date: 1988 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:26:y:1988:i:11:p:1133-1139 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.