I would say, rather, ”...to which we don’t differentially attribute causes other than the passage of time.”
OK, I’ll accept that. I see your point.
However such an approach would require flexibility with what you’d call “disease” or “normality”. For example, old people lose muscle mass and cannot acquire it as easily as young people. It it “normal”? It it a “disease”? If you develop a drug that you can take to fix that problem (but you’ll have to keep on taking it forever), will you describe it as having defeated a disease?
Well, I’m not exactly sure what we mean by requiring flexibility here, but I would certainly agree that our flexibility with respect to what’s a disease and what’s normal aging are related.
To put this another way, I would say “effects of disease D” and “natural effects of aging” are both social constructs, and that the psychological/cultural constraints that cause some pattern of observations X to get tagged with the first label also inhibit X from getting tagged with the second label.
None of which really has a damned thing to do with whether people live longer healthier lives, so to the extent that we care about that, we may do better to not get caught up in worrying about these categories.
There are a lot of diseases which are different enough from aging to make the distinction more than a social construct: infectious diseases, congenital abnormalities, etc.
But yes, you can say: this is the ideal stable state, I want to maintain it forever, whatever causes it break, be it disease or aging, is bad and we want to fix that. Sure.
OK, I’ll accept that. I see your point.
However such an approach would require flexibility with what you’d call “disease” or “normality”. For example, old people lose muscle mass and cannot acquire it as easily as young people. It it “normal”? It it a “disease”? If you develop a drug that you can take to fix that problem (but you’ll have to keep on taking it forever), will you describe it as having defeated a disease?
Well, I’m not exactly sure what we mean by requiring flexibility here, but I would certainly agree that our flexibility with respect to what’s a disease and what’s normal aging are related.
To put this another way, I would say “effects of disease D” and “natural effects of aging” are both social constructs, and that the psychological/cultural constraints that cause some pattern of observations X to get tagged with the first label also inhibit X from getting tagged with the second label.
None of which really has a damned thing to do with whether people live longer healthier lives, so to the extent that we care about that, we may do better to not get caught up in worrying about these categories.
There are a lot of diseases which are different enough from aging to make the distinction more than a social construct: infectious diseases, congenital abnormalities, etc.
But yes, you can say: this is the ideal stable state, I want to maintain it forever, whatever causes it break, be it disease or aging, is bad and we want to fix that. Sure.