Human nature differs from the nature of other living entities. We possess organisation, agency, communication, sociality and environmental power that occur in many forms throughout the living world. Our distinctive qualitative properties include generative symbolic language, cumulative culture, money, institutional organisation, normativity, narrative selfhood and recursive self-transformation. We humans are living organisms whose evolved nature enables us collectively to interpret, regulate and partially remake the conditions of our own existence. The development of organisations and nations passes some of these properties to their collective action.
I will use a variety of infectious disease examples to look at the philosophy of human nature, of organisational nature and of the nature of nations, as well as the personal the cellular and the biochemical. Examples include cholera, Campylobacter, polio, Guinea worm, Cryptosporidium, The English Sweat, and issues relating to the philosophy of causation. How should we regard this collective activity (in the case of infectious diseases I mean detection, management, control, prevention and eradication)?
Some problems can be undertaken by individuals alone while others are a product of collective intelligence and part of it is focussed in organisations as well as nations. Public health is designed to provide the protections that cannot be provided by individuals on their own, or by physicians treating individuals as individual cases only. Nations and organisations are living entities that possess some elements of the individual properties that can be found in other living entities.