Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to explain and explore the ethical implications of the medicalisation of our subjectivities, with a particular focus on the right to health.

Paper long abstract:

This paper interrogates Paul Farmer's statement that "the right to health

is perhaps the least contested social right" (2005:19), starting from a hypothesis that the right to health has been strengthened by medicalised subjectivities. I start by fleshing out the questions implied by my hypothesis, before discussing my own position as a physician and trainee in psychiatry, with a pre-existing belief that health is and should be a human right.

I establish my theoretical rationale by explicating the Foucaultian

concept of subjectivity as the medium through which power relations are

enacted in the liberal state. Following this, I briefly trace the history and

philosophy of human rights, finding autonomy to be a central organising

principle.

I then interpret the sociological and ethnographic evidence, delineating

how biological explanations of suffering served to reconfigure them as ethical

problems amenable to biomedical solutions, thus creating a privileged role for doctors. I argue that medicalised subjectivities have been crafted and that they strengthen the right to health, but can have consequences that are both beneficial and oppressive, as universal ethics are enacted in complex social space. Therefore, we must be mindful of how they are being used and experienced, taking care not to silence those whom human rights seek to protect. In particular, I find that there is a danger of the authoritative voice of the medical professional being used in unintended ways as the universal right to health becomes imbricated in local moral worlds.