Être normal va-t-il de soi ?

Is being normal self-evident? Ethical reflection on the idea of norm, analysis and stakes. An ethical reflection on the idea of norm implies questioning its definition and especially the link with its opposite, pathology, as the interaction between these two ideas determines our thinking about health, disease and disability. The works of Canguilhem and Ricoeur show that there are two fundamentally different ways of distinguishing the normal from the pathological: either as a quantitative difference - deviations from the statistics are considered as “abnormal” - or as a qualitative difference, the pathological being another way of being having its own value. Thus, the “normal” can be related to several ways of being: ranking them would mean renouncing to understand them and to act appropriately. This is illustrated by deafness: the difference is radical according to the paradigm chosen to approach it. This analysis is significant as the idea of norm is never neutral, but always bound to actions of normalization which have societal consequences that can lead to exclusion and active rejection, as illustrated by Down syndrome. So it is about understanding how to nurse without normalizing, respecting the person in his or her own normativity, the role of medicine being to tirelessly support and develop this power of understanding at the risk of giving up really nursing a person. Giving his or her place back to the person, in a world in which exclusion increases constantly, is both a challenge and an emergency.