Philosophical theories of human well-being explain what a good human life is for the person who is living it. At first sight, it would appear that health is a necessary but insufficient condition for human wellbeing. While well-being may require a wide range of values, such as personal relationships, achievement, and knowledge, health appears to be essential to any good human life. If this view– the common sense view – is correct, then health is required for human well-being. Nobody can live a good human life without also being healthy.

Against this view, some philosophers have recently argued that if we understand health to be the proper functioning of one’s body (healthy eyes, for example, are the way that eyes are “supposed to work”), then it has a highly contingent relationship to human well-being (Schroeder 2016). On this view, there are a great number of cases when unhealthy and healthy patients can be equally well-off; it is possible, for example, that a functional deficit of the body might affect one person profoundly whereas it might register as little more than an inconvenience for another. Health, in this case, does not necessarily improve or diminish one’s well-being. We call this the considered view. Clearly, the common sense and considered views are incompatible. Which, if any, correctly identifies the relationship between health and human well-being?

Our proposed project aims to answer this question by first addressing the deeper philosophical questions about the nature of human well-being and health. We will argue that, if health is not merely taken to be the proper functioning of one’s physical body, as presupposed by the considered view, then the relationship between health and human well-being is far more complex than either the common sense or considered views acknowledge. This claim is only bolstered if one supplants the concept of health as the proper functioning of one’s physical body with the concept of lifestyle or “integrative health.”