Abstract
The “One Health” initiative promises to combine different health-related issues concerning humans and animals in an overarching concept and in related practices to the benefit of both humans and animals. Far from dismissing One Health, this paper nevertheless argues that different veterinary interventions are determined by social practices and connected expectations and are, thus, hardly compliant with only one single conceptualization of health, as the One Health concept suggests. One Health relies on a naturalistic understanding of health focusing on similar bodies that show a similar etiology. However, logics, normativity, and practices exhibit differences when it comes to combatting infectious diseases, maintaining productivity of livestock animals or preventing companion animals from suffering. Therefore, drawing from Charles Rosenberg’s groundbreaking texts on framing disease, we suggest to conceive of health as dispersed in different frames. Thus, this paper proposes to interpret health as complex and multi-layered concept. We distinguish and introduce an objectivist, a functional, and a sentientistic frame of health. Instead of reducing the differential veterinary practices to one paradigmatic understanding, health is seen as a model case of Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance. Different and distinct perspectives on veterinary medicine show sufficient overlapping that allows for a common conceptualization, but there is not one single underlying logic suitable to understand and ethically reflect all veterinary interventions. This differentiability promises to reduce moral stress in veterinary professionals since it allows the interpretation of various, seemingly contradicting practices as dependent on multi-layered and socially determined scopes of responsibility.
Highlights
Beyond the Scope of One HealthFood Ethics (2019) 3:91–108In practice, there is more than one world, and likewise more than one health. (Hinchliffe 2016: 31)Veterinarians as professionals in food chains are first and foremost responsible for health, and preventing and treating disease
Far from dismissing One Health, this paper argues that different veterinary interventions are determined by social practices and connected expectations and are, hardly compliant with only one single conceptualization of health, as the One Health concept suggests
It reveals the problematic pretenses of One Health (OH) when promising an all-inclusive account to health in animals and humans that is not thwarted by tensions between different kinds of health and different needs and interests beyond health. An awareness of this complexity can contribute to a reduction of moral distress since veterinarians that are mindful of this diversity of scopes can refrain from applying the same ethical expectations or criteria to all kinds of practices – which would entail the experience of fundamental logical and moral inconsistencies. It has not been the aim of this paper to argue against OH as a professional imperative
Summary
There is more than one world, and likewise more than one health. (Hinchliffe 2016: 31). The basic assumptions behind this imperative are that (a) humans and animals are equal or at least similar with regard to the etiology of disease and their health related needs; (b) these needs are interdependent and can coexist without friction in practice; (c) the treatment of humans and animals can follow the same logic and procedures in different contexts like combatting infectious diseases, maintaining productivity of livestock animals or maintaining wellbeing of companion animals These assumptions entail a number of promises that are, among others, (a) to decrease or even solve antagonisms between humans and animals with regard to health; (b) to reduce the veterinarians’ moral distress of balancing between different, allegedly mutually exclusive needs; (c) to support veterinary practice by transferring knowledge from human to veterinary medicine (Whittaker 2015). This forms a prerequisite for a reconsideration of the concept of OH
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