and individuals deviant. This is significant with regard to the standard
perceptiondescribed in the introductionwhich holds that illness is
differentiated from deviance. Focusing on overweight individuals the
preceding section shows that medicalizing fatness as the disease obesity
does not protect the fat from accusations of deviance.
I propose that this connection between disease and deviance is of
broader relevance than only for fatness/obesity. Crucial to the connection,
I think, is the ideal of prevention. Modern societies present many risks for
people to develop welfare diseases. Although broader responsibilities are
recognized, it ultimately falls on individual citizens themselves to behave
socially responsible and make the healthy choice.^23 Those who fail to do so
should be awareat least for lifestyle risksthat having a disease shall
not protect them from moral reproach. Their disease is seen as proof of
them ignoring the experts’ advice and this implies a moral failure of social
irresponsibility.
The separation of disease and deviance has much to do with the
widely recognized problem of blaming the victim. Connecting disease and
deviance, which I propose happens in the case over overweight and broader
with lifestyle risks, makes the problem of blaming the victim urgent again.
Governments are now torn between two important morally charged policy
incentives. On the one hand they have to protect victims from being blamed
and on the other hand they have to stop the obesity epidemic. The above
suggests they cannot do both at the same time. Solving this conundrum is
an important issue facing not only governments but also obesity experts
and policy makers.
NOTES
- From now on I shall mostly omit the quotes and only use them at first
mention of a concept I want understood as a social construction. - The most common measure used to decide whether people are overweight is
the body mass index (BMI), which relates a person’s height to their weight. With a
BMI lower than 18.5 people are considered “underweight.” For BMIs ranging from
18.5 to 24.9 people are considered to have a “normal weight” implying a health
optimum. Being “overweight” refers to BMIs between 25 and 29.9. With a BMI of
30 and over people are considered obese, with a BMI between 30 and 34.9 seen as
“mild obesity,” and a BMI over 40 as “morbid obesity.” For a person measuring
180 cm this means that if they weigh less than 60 kg they are underweight. Above
81 kg they are overweight; above 97 kg they are mildly obese; and above 130 kg
they are considered to be morbidly obese.
Obesity as Disease and Deviance 133