The harm of medical disorder as harm in the damage sense

AbstractJerome Wakefield has argued that a disorder is a harmful dysfunction. This paper develops how Wakefield should construeharmful in his harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA). Recently, Neil Feit has argued that classic puzzles involved in analyzing harm render Wakefield ’s HDA better off without harm as a necessary condition. Whether or not one conceives of harm as comparative or non-comparative, the concern is that the HDA forces people to classify as mere dysfunction what they know to be a disorder. For instance, one can conceive of cases where simultaneous dis orders prevent each other from being, in any traditional sense, actually harmful; in such cases, according to the HDA, neither would be a disorder. I argue that the sense ofharm that Wakefield should employ in the HDA is dispositional, similar to the sense ofharm used when describing a vile of poison: “Be careful! That’s poison. It’s harmful.” I call thisharm in the damage sense. Using this sense ofharm enables the HDA to avoid Feit ’s arguments, and thus it should be preferred to other senses when analyzing harmful dysfunction.
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research