Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

"Rights" of the Obese

Rate this topic


Recommended Posts

By Paula Hall from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Since NoodleFood has been blogging a lot lately on the subject of health, nutrition, and achieving a healthy body weight, I thought I'd weigh in (sorry, couldn't resist the pun) with some updates on laws concerning obesity.

That's right -- laws.

The City Council of Binghamton, New York, has passed a new ordinance called The Binghamton Human Rights Law. It aims to protect two classes of individuals from discrimination in employment, housing, education, and public accommodation: the transgendered and the overweight. Recently, Canadian airlines were forced to give obese people two seats for the price of one, on the theory that being overweight is a disability. And in 2004 Medicare removed language from the Medicare Coverage Issues Manual declaring obesity is not an illness, which was widely interpreted as allowing Medicare claims on the basis that obesity is a disease.

"Discrimination" against the overweight is a hot topic. Those who see and decry such discrimination claim that many overweight people aren't responsible for their condition. They claim that obesity is a disease, the result of environmental factors, genetic factors, and food addiction. You can find discussion of all these claims at the American Obesity Association, which lobbied for the Medicare change and proclaims on its home page that

Obesity is not a simple condition of eating too much. It is now recognized that obesity is a serious, chronic disease. No human condition — not race, religion, gender, ethnicity or disease state — compares to obesity in prevalence and prejudice, mortality and morbidity, sickness and stigma.

The American Obesity Association doesn't seem to be very active lately, but the Obesity Action Coalition is very active. Their "Advocacy" page declares that "[o]besity is a complex disease" and complains that "some [insurance] payors and employers still do not recognize obesity and morbid obesity as a disease."

The notion of "rights" concerning employment, housing, education and public accommodation turn the concept of individual rights on its head. Individual rights protect freedom of action and prohibit the initiation of force. A legal claim to anything that must be produced by another human being -- like a place to work, a house, tutelage and a seat on an airplane -- requires the initiation of force against the producers and violates individual rights.

But all that is Rights 101. What I think is particularly astounding about calls to treat the overweight as involuntarily disabled is that they apparently ignore that Americans have been getting fatter for decades. That is -- the further back you look, the thinner Americans appeared to be. There's little valuable data on nutrition at the Center for Disease control, but they do have a great little graphic which shows how much fatter Americans have become since 1985. Below are some sample images:

Obesity-1985-799962.jpg

Obesity-1996-700034.jpg

Obesity-2007-798200.jpg

I haven't looked very hard for data on American obesity before 1985, but I wouldn't be surprised if Americans were thinner in the decades prior to 1985. But let's say 1985 is a good baseline. What has changed since 1985? One candidate is the explosion in technology that allows us to feed and entertain ourselves with very little effort -- microwave ovens, videos, electronic games, cable television and the like. But the primary problem is how our diet has changed in the last few decades -- more grains, sweeteners and vegetable oils. On top of that, many who tried to lose weight followed the advice of the government or of misinformed experts and went on a low-fat, low-calorie, high-carbohydrate diet. That is not a long-term solution.

So there's a lot of bad information out there, but there's a lot of good information available, too. But do the advocacy groups focus on making getting better information available? No, that would require acknowledging that obese people are responsible for getting themselves into shape. What the advocacy groups concentrate on is getting other people to expend the effort they don't think their constituents should have to expend.

The U.S. government is on the horns of a dilemma. The CDC website focuses on diet and exercise, taking the position that people can control their weight and in large part because the government is paying for ever-growing medical costs attributable to obesity. On the other hand, advocates of obesity "rights" are having success pushing legislation treating obesity as a disease for which the obese have no responsibility. So where is the government going to come down on this issue?

You'd think that with socialized medicine on the horizon in the U.S. we'd see increasing government emphasis on preventing obesity. But on the other hand, look at the demographics -- the percent of the voter base that is obese is increasing. I think we'll see more legislation like The Binghamton Human Rights Law. In a country dominated by pressure-group warfare, might is right -- and might is also "rights."

(Thanks to Diana for her suggestions on this post!)501487187

Cross-posted from Metablog

Link to comment
Share on other sites

When you consider that your president-elect understands the concept of individual rights perfectly, but rejects it, that such an thing could occur in the culture is really not surprising. This movement ( :lol: ) is making the same mistake the feminists made- the idea that coercion, would make the grey mass less hostile towards them.

An essential grasp of individual rights covers all bases, it is this we need to impart.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think there is another issue at play here as well. In my senior year at college I took an excellent course in biomedical ethics, and one of the things we did in class was to attempt to define the concept "malady". Malady is meant to be a more expansive term than others such as disease or injury, such that whether you have torn your ACL or developed diabetes or have bipolar disorder, they are all maladies (it got a little trickier when we tried to categorize things like "menopause"). At any rate, the professor identified that part of the need to identify precisely what is a malady vs. what is, say, an enhancement (like getting bigger boobs or razor teeth) is relevant for things like insurance purposes. And that is something I feel is absolutely crucial to this discussion.

So much of the debate over what is an illness vs. what is a condition vs. what is just your own stupidity comes down to getting someone else to pay for your medical care, which is not necessarily wrong if you have a contractual agreement but nevertheless is at play here. In a proper consideration of the matter, however, these classifications should not really be that important. The only things that ought to be relevant here are, do you require a doctor's care, is there a doctor willing to provide such care, and can you and the doctor agree to payment terms? Then it doesn't matter how you got fat, but if you're so fat it's going to kill you, you can see a doctor to help you and he can figure out the best way to make you less fat. If it's overeating, he'll treat you for that. If it's a hormonal condition, he'll treat that. Etc. etc. and everyone goes home happy.

This is also further confirmation to me that we were going down the wrong road in passing the ADA.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's strange that they don't make any attempt to explain why this 'disease' was completely unknown outside of the very wealthy until recently. Quite a conundrum, that.

Well, I don't know about that. There are legitimate diseases that were barely if ever known until modern times. Radiation poisoning, for instance.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...