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Thomas On Healthcare?
Wednesday, March 21, 2012, 11:05 AM

John O’Callaghan of Notre Dame writes this in response to John Breen’s claim about the Church’s proper response to the HHS mandate. A Thomist philosopher’s take on the matter:

But with the involvement of the state comes the coercive power of the state.  And so there are at least two problems with the position that the very meaning of ‘health’ and ‘healthcare’ are subjective determinations of the autonomy of private individuals.  The first is semantic and bears upon coherence.  If the meaning of “health” and “healthcare” really are subjective determinations of the autonomy of private individuals, the state in mandating any sort of legislation concerning “healthcare” is quite literally legislating nothing.  Any apparent law involving the terms “health” and “healthcare” are really schema with place markers or variables in them like “X” and “Y”, which of course means that they are not laws at all.  Thus the incoherence–the law is not a law. And this brings me to the second problem with the position, the moral or political.

Read the rest here

1 Comment

    David Nickol
    March 21st, 2012 | 12:24 pm

    It takes a certain amount of nerve to comment on a discussion between John O’Callaghan, a philosophy at Notre Dame, and John Breen, a law professor at Loyola, especially given the fact that I don’t fully understand what either is saying, but as I noted on MOJ, I believe the idea that “the position that the very meaning of ‘health’ and ‘healthcare’ are subjective determinations of the autonomy of private individuals” is not John Breen’s, but rather that of someone who wrote a comment following a post by Breen, who himself responded:

    First, you suggest that the understanding of “health” that I put forth, as a scientific term with an objective meaning, is mistaken and should be replaced with an understanding of “health” as autonomy that has only a subjective meaning. That is, you argue that “health” is “what each person sees as the proper functioning of their own body as an integral aspect of their self.”

    So it seems to me O’Callaghan is attributing to Breen a position that Breen has repudiated.

    However, I do think that Breen’s original argument—that given his preferred definitions of health and health care, contraception has no place in laws dealing with health care coverage—is a weak one. If, for the purposes of legislation, legislators include something in a bill as health care, then legally speaking it is health care. The legislators’ understanding (to the extent it is known) of statutes they write is what determines how the statutes will be interpreted.

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