Body and Eating
The chapter focuses on eating and nutrition. Graf and Schweiger describe the available evidence on childhood obesity and discuss its negative effects on the health, agency, and self-relations of affected children. They then turn to the family and the stat
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In this chapter, we focus on those dangers to the bodies of children closely related to nutrition, namely obesity and eating disorders. Being adequately nourished is one of the most fundamental functionings for the life of every human being. In the capability approach, it is often mentioned as a dimension of well-being which finds wide support from many people, independent of their specific conception of the good life. Probably most capability theorists would claim, at least initially, that every adult should have the real freedom (the capability) not only to eat enough, but also to have access to a balanced and healthy diet and that, for every child, the respective functioning should be secured. However, the conceptual analysis of the capability to eat or to be adequately nourished has not been elaborated in depth. One reason for this is certainly that many scholars have used the approach in relation to extreme poverty and, in this regard, interesting results have been achieved. Sen’s examination of famines, for instance, showed how important entitlements are for having access to food and that food availability is often not the only problem. In other words, he pointed to certain social conversion factors which decide whether someone has the capability to eat, which emphasized the complexity of the issue (Sen 1983). However, for nutrition in © The Author(s) 2017 G. Graf, G. Schweiger, Ethics and the Endangerment of Children’s Bodies, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40213-0_3
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Ethics and the Endangerment of Children’s Bodies
the contexts we are interested in—affluent societies, particularly in relation to children—there is very little work done from a capability perspective, such that it will be necessary to develop our ethical evaluation of obesity and eating disorders in a close dialogue with what the empirical sciences tell us about these phenomena, as well as how they can be seen as dangers to the bodily integrity of children. Let us start with some remarks on the concept of eating itself and about the role that eating should fulfil regarding the well-being and wellbecoming of children, if we take the capability approach as the basis. For our analyses of obesity and eating disorders, it will be necessary to add many aspects that go beyond eating, given that these phenomena are just too complex to reduce it to one dimension. However, eating is certainly involved, so it will be helpful to get a better understanding of what it means from a normative point of view. We believe that the concept of capability-enhancing eating, which is closely related to that of bodily integrity, can be useful here. We approach it primarily as a functioning, but which early on in the life course incorporates elements of freedom and choice, giving it some characteristics of a capability. As with all functionings, the importance of these freedoms increases as children get older. We call the concept capability-enhancing eating because we would like to draw attention to its role in providing real freedoms to a child in the long run. It cert
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