Health, Naturalism, and Functional Efficiency

This essay develops an account of health, the functional efficiency theory, which derives from Christopher Boorse's biostatistical theory (BST). Like the BST, the functional efficiency theory is a nonevaluative view of health, but unlike the BST, it argues that the fundamental theoretical task is to distinguish levels of efficiency with which the parts and processes within organisms and within systems within organisms function. Which of these to label as healthy or pathological is of secondary importance. Because the statistical distributions that Boorse's account relies on are distributions of functional efficiency, the functional efficiency theory arguably complements rather than challenges the BST.