Obesity and personal responsibility
Rod Dreher is struggling to determine how best to deal with obesity:
So how do we discourage obesity? How do we treat those suffering from obesity with compassion, while at the same time maintaining enough stigma on obesity to encourage people to hold the line against it in their own lives? It’s a very difficult question, I know, because you don’t want to add to the suffering of obese people, but at the same time, to declare obesity as nothing that needs to be overcome is to accept a destructive, expensive condition that ought not be accepted so easily.
On one hand, obesity is a very personal challenge for millions of people, one that it’s not clear a liberal society should take a stand on. Dreher also reminds us that there is a significant element of genetic determinism in obesity. However, there is a real cost to society at large in terms of health care; further, we as a society should feel some obligation to help those, particularly in poor communities, that don’t have access to (as much) nutritious food and information about proper nutrition.
Society functions around mores. The image of the rail-thin celebrity exists as a rare ideal, counter-posed with the image of 1/3 of the adult population being obese. It’s right and good to continue to exert some kind of pressure on the population to lose weight, but that pressure has been disfigured by the image of Paris HIlton et al. The imagery, it seems to me, makes the small steps necessary for real weight loss seem futile. The “big is beautiful” camp is right to condemn the imagery of our emaciated starlets as ideal, but their critique of popular culture imagery shouldn’t necessarily extend to the more positive pressure we should continue to place on each other to stay healthy.
-John
Related posts:
- Personal responsibility and the nanny state
- Is Fatism justified?
- Is government intervention in obesity justified?
- Does health reform treat the obese unfairly?
- Guest Post: Responsibility in Rwanda
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