Walter Veit (2025), Croatian Journal of Philosophy 25(73) (online 2025-04-25); preprint on PhilSci-Archive (item 24933) — DOI-10.52685/cjp.25.73.7
Key takeaways
- Kukla’s proposal to define health and disease purely by what medicalising would do for social justice defeats itself. Leaving justice undefined turns the concepts into a moral battleground, and without a naturalist or social-constructivist anchor, “medicine” collapses into “whatever promotes justice”, which is no definition at all.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-097. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Kukla (2014) argued that attempts to define health should drop naturalist and social-constructivist considerations, which fail to capture the concepts’ normativity, and define health and disease purely in terms of social justice. Veit argues that this purely normativist project is self-defeating. Health and disease therefore cannot be defined by appeal to social justice alone, although justice may still properly bear on medical decisions.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 40 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-097 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as a short, clearly structured critique of moral conceptual engineering applied to health, though its two objections rest on informal argument and a thought experiment, not on an engagement with Kukla’s replies.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-097, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — t=40s. The argument is compact and the skim has captured both horns, so a deeper reading would add little unless the record takes up the philosophy of medicine.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-097 is that reading):
- It is a worked case of the limits of ameliorative conceptual engineering, relevant wherever a concept is redefined for its social effects (compare LIT-214 on blunted mental-health concepts).
- Check whether the circularity objection really bites against Kukla’s institutional definition, or whether Kukla can take the institution of medicine as independently fixed, as Veit himself concedes on p. 17.
- The published version is titled differently, so check it for revisions.
Access when seeded: Read the full PhilSci-Archive preprint (20 pp.), titled “Why the concepts of health and disease cannot be grounded in social justice alone”: the abstract, the index, §1, the openings of §§3–4, §5 in full (pp. 12–14, 17) and the §6 conclusion. PhilSci record: deposited 2025-03-24, with keywords. Crossref gives the published version under the title above in Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 2025-04-25. published: is the preprint deposit date. Page numbers below are the preprint’s.