Building a heathier world means letting people be who they are.
These essays are concerned with thoughts that contribute to the health of populations, that can inform science and scholarship and, indirectly perhaps, action. Ultimately, The Healthiest Goldfish aims to be a constructive project. I am interested in building structures that we can all contribute to, that we can create, that generate health. But in talking about building an intellectual architecture that generates health, I fear that sometimes we forget the “why” of our work—the reason we are trying to generate health. This fear has been a reoccurring theme of these essays. As I have written before, we are generating health not for its own sake, but so that people can live, and live fully. Health is a means not an end, and it is important that we leave room for the joy that accompanies living healthy.
With that point made, though, I think that there remains a different point to emphasize towards a practical philosophy of health. How exactly do these structures support living? Notions of what it means to live optimally have been developed in recent years in a growing literature about human flourishing. All of that is to the good. But the particular part of this goal that I want to address today is people living as they choose to, and the balance we have to strike with how we think about this and how we act to respect it.
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