The obesity jab may save the food industry’s bacon, but should it?

theguardian.com:

S uppose there were such a thing as an “experience machine”, a contraption you could plug yourself into and live any life you wanted? Would you plug in? Or imagine we invented a type of zombie, a monster that looks, behaves and responds exactly like us but has no inner experiences? Would this creature have consciousness?

Or how about this. Suppose there were a magical injection that fat people could take to become thin, no effort required. Should we make it widely available?

Philosophers are fond of coming up with thought experiments involving magical ideas – they are useful for shaking up assumptions and unexamined beliefs. But last week a thought experiment seemed to come to life. News that a “weight-loss wonder drug” called semaglutide is to be made available on the NHS is presenting rather a challenge to our beliefs about fatness and what, exactly, one ought to do about it. A lot of people instinctively dislike the idea, but struggle to tell us quite why.

These people can be roughly divided into two camps. The first camp hates it broadly because it seems to excuse the obese of “personal responsibility”. The jab, in short, is cheating. Prof Karol Sikora, a prominent oncologist and health spokesperson, tweeted that he was “uneasy” about the treatment. “It sends completely the wrong message… Take a jab and all will be fine. Not the right attitude.” The commentator Julia Hartley-Brewer agreed. The jab smacked of the “nanny state”, she said. “Instead [we should be] saying, stop eating all the pizza, put down the fizzy drinks.”

This is a rather strange approach to a health condition killing 4 million a year globally. Willpower is recognised to be a puny fighter in the battle against obesity; diet and exercise only work for