Should obesity be treated as a disease?

Obesity can be caused by injury or medicine

Question: Should obesity be treated as a disease?
Position‹2 of 3›: Obesity is not a disease
Argument‹2 of 3›: Obesity can be caused by injury or medicine

A disease is not something that can be caused by external factors.

The argument

The objection to classifying obesity as a disease starts from what the category ordinarily contains. Cancer, heart disease and dementia are the paradigm cases: long-term medical illnesses that arise from pathogens or genetic disorders, processes that happen to a person and that they did not choose and cannot simply decline. The category earns its meaning from that shared character, and proponents of this position argue that obesity does not share it. On their account obesity is most often the result of lifestyle, of unhealthy food and a lack of motivation to change what is being eaten or how much a person moves. Whatever else can be said about those causes, they are not pathogens and not genetic disorders, and a condition produced by them does not belong in a category defined by pathology. Calling it a disease would stretch the word to cover outcomes of ordinary choices, which on this view empties the term of the distinction it exists to draw. The cases that look hardest for this position are offered as confirming it. Someone may be obese because they are paralyzed and cannot exercise, or because they are taking medicine that causes weight gain. These are real causes and nobody suggests the person is at fault for them, but neither is the obesity itself a disease process that has begun in them. In the first case the disease, if there is one, is whatever caused the paralysis; in the second, the weight gain is a side effect of a treatment for some other illness. In both the obesity is a consequence of something else rather than an illness in its own right, which is precisely the point: whether it follows from injury, from medicine or from lifestyle, obesity is downstream of its causes rather than a pathology of its own. For that reason, on this view, obesity is not a disease.

Premises

[P1]Diseases like cancer, heart disease, and dementia are long-term illnesses caused by pathogens or genetic disorders. [P2] Obesity is most often caused instead by a lack of motivation and unhealthy eating, which cannot make it a disease. [P3] Even when obesity follows from an injury that prevents exercise or a medicine that causes weight gain, those causes are not the onset of a disease. [C] Therefore, because obesity can be caused by injury, medicine, or lifestyle rather than pathology, obesity is not a disease.

Counter-arguments

Diseases like cancer can be caused by outside elements (e.g. carcinogens). Just because obesity is caused by things like diet and exercise doesn't mean it cannot be classified as a disease.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] If cancer can be caused by outside forces such as carcinogens, then obesity can be classified as a disease.