engleski

The Value of human life and health in health policy of Ideal States

In order to investigate the development of views and positions concerning the value of life and health in ideally conceived human societies, the author has studied and compared the forms and systems of health care descibed in Plato's Republic, Aristote's Politics, More's Utopia, Petrić's La citta felice, Campanella's Civitas Solis and Bacon's New Atlantis. The research results show that it is in all of these treatises the preservation of human life and promotion of health are regarded as necessary precognition for the realisation of an ideal state. However, none of these models define human life and health as a basic human right in the sense of social justice, as a universal social aim. On the contrary, these works evaluate human life and health exclusively in the context of an interpretation of the purpose of individual human life in social systems of unequal rights, including the right to achieve the declared ultimate goal of human life. In view of defining this goal, the purpose of health and health care are interpreted in a harmony of such principles as moral duty- virtue-comforst-pleasure-satisfaction-hapiness-privilege, to the principle according to which health is required in order that wealth and prosperity of the state may be acquired and preserved. Utilitarian concepts are evident in the policies intended to preserve and promote normal healthy individual human life, with clearly predefined bodily, physical, psychological and intellectual qualities which correspond to the hierarchy and the needs of the state, including social status, stately- socially productive jobs and duties of each individual. In the above- mentioned ideal state models, the ruler-legislator has exclusive competence to make health-care decisions, not only as a right but as a responsibility for maintenance of preservation and reproduction of normal healthy population. His duty is to regulate and ensure the implementation of factors - determined by experience, philosophy and science -relevant to the offspring and adult subjects' health and the preservation of premature degradation of their physical and intellectual capacities. For the Classical, Renaissance and early Baroque philosophers, it meant regulating matrimony, conception, pregnancy, nursing, everyday life, including the factors of environment, housing, public utilities, individual hygiene, nourishment, water supply, education, work, rest periods, recreation, prevention and punishment of unhealthy habits, preservation of optimum numbers and demographic structure of the population, organisation of professional health care and treatment, physicians' work, treatment in healthcare facilities, drug supply, but also the regulation of the conditions for research in the nature and man, their life, health, disease and death. If we pay attention to the elements of medical ethics, we may see that in the ideal state models the task of scientists and researchers, the doctor -patient relationship, the apprising of truth and the right to secrecy, including moral grounds for medical decisions regarding abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, care of the chronically and terminally ill patients and the dying ones, the right to life and care of mentally retarded and physically handicapped persons, are all strongly marked by utilitarian concepts as concerns the purpose and value of human life, and the moral-ethical principles are as a rule introduced and postulated outside the medical profession.

Human life; health; value; society; utopian

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