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The Morality of Staying Healthy?
We got a provocative pitch from LOFoster two weeks ago about "the moral impetus to stay healthy and within the normal limits of weight," and it just caught my eye:
Never have I read or seen a discussion of our obligation to each other, to our economy, to the planet, and to our families, to maintain healthful habits. I observe so many who (and here I'm excluding people whose financial situation is so dire they are eating poorly as a matter of economics) eat gluttonously, over drink, over medicate and then become attached, for the remaining duration of their lives, to intense medical interventions from drugs to diagnostics to procedures.
Also -- when I see an extremely overweight child who cannot run or skip or clamber up a slide, I think "that's a form of child abuse" -- that kid's parents have sentenced him to a life in which he cannot partake of some of life's simplest joys and which is aligning him with lifestyle diseases such as diabetes....
You can read the rest here. What do you folks make of this? How far could a conversation about the morality of staying healthy go?
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Skinny green?
Aren't people healthier then ever? Don't they live longer lives? Yes, much of it is medical advances. Being fat can of course be unhealthy in many circumstances, but so can being too skinny. Can't running harm your joints? Doesn't tanning cause skin cancer? Is cycling more dangerous then riding in a car? Rock climbing? Where do we draw a line with this moral responsibility? Who knows why someone may or may not be overweight? I think obesity, despite the health implications is the least of our concerns, it is an easy target by misguided people.
Perhaps, many see 'the fat' as a remnant of the Bush era, along with the Hummer and everything ultra-American, obesity is the new American flag---and we love to hate it. However well intentioned people may be their anti-fat arguments are specious. I think the quality and character of individuals is much more important then how they look or how healthy we might perceive them to be.
At any rate, health is personal, it really only effects you, despite all these lovely statistics we try to introduce about health-care costs and how fat people are depleting the planet of Snickers bars. There many other unhealthy folks out there doing their share of sucking up the health-care dollars and planetary resources such as the depressed. But, I forgot, the fat haters think being overweight is a choice---whereas depression is an illness. But, we all make bad choices! Your choice to eat meat or live in the suburbs, or live in New Orleans, might be as bad a choice as eating too much. Maybe people are fat because eating brings comfort in a world of discomfort---who is to say this "choice" is nefarious at its core. Why should we expect people to be healthy? Or want to be healthy? Or see good-health as a virtue? Some of us may not even care to live.
Too much of fat hatred stems from aesthetic grounds and symbolic generalizations---I think many are unwilling to admit this, so they allegedly support their views with health and environmental statistics. We don't focus on other unhealthy behaviors, attitudes and lifestyles nearly as much, because we can't see them as easily and they don't repulse us. There are enough ways society already divides humans like cattle, through good and bad gates, we don't need anymore. Isn't the body's and mind's betrayal enough of a scarlet letter? Do these people need anymore shame?