CRISIS OF THE LIBERAL MODEL OF HEALTH AS AN INDIVIDUAL RESOURCE AND PRIVATE CHOICE IN THE SITUATION OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC

© 2020 Saburova L.A.

2020 — № 2 (20)


Citation link:

Saburova L.A. (2020). Krizis liberal’noj modeli zdorov’ja kak individual’nogo resursa i lichnogo vybora v situacii pandemii COVID-19 [Crisis of the Liberal Model of Health as an Individual Resource and Private Choice in the Situation of COVID-19 Pandemic]. Medicinskaja antropologija i biojetika [Medical Anthropology and Bioethics], 2 (20)


Author info:

Lyudmila Albertovna Saburova, Cand. Philos. Sc. and Associate Professor, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and Law (Russian Academy of Sciences, Ural Branch)

E-mail: sabur@udm.ru


Keywords: liberal model of health, individual resource, individual and collective responsibility, private choice, pandemic, restrictions

Abstract. The article raises the problem of correlation between the liberal model of health with the challenges the humankind has faced in the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. The liberal model of health, which took roots in the everyday practices of the last decades, implies individual responsibility for health, understanding of health as a private resource and a result of private choice. Within this model, investments into health imply a free choice from a wide array of tools offered by market economy, as well as a variety of traditional and alternative discourses in the sphere of health. In the situation of a pandemic, which, on the one hand, imposes administrative limitations onto the everyday life and, on the other hand, does not offer in the information field any relevant health preservation tools, opportunities for choosing individual paths of health preservation radically narrow. The whole spectrum of behavioral patterns can be placed on the scale “COVIDophobia” – “COVIDoscepsis”. The article makes the assumption that decision-making according to this scale is today defined by legitimacy of the authorities’ and official medicine in the eyes of the decision-maker. The author comes to the conclusion that exactly this is why problems of health preservation are inevitably politicized, while the liberal model is going to transform considerably.


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