RAY, KEISHA How empirical and social explanations of normal influence decisions to treat the neurodiverse • Published in Ethics and Neurodiversity. Ed. C. Herrera and Alexandra Perry. Cambridge Scholars Press. Cambridge, UK. 2013. In this chapter I offer a philosophical analysis of the ways that social and empirical explanations of “normal” 1 are thought to make a difference in determining what conditions ought to be the concern of medicine as a matter of justice in health care. Because normative judgments concerning health care, including the allocation of resources, are unavoidable, defining and utilizing normal as a baseline for whom medicine ought to or who medicine is obligated to treat emerges as a common, and perhaps unavoidable judgment among many others. In most instances, utilizing an explanation of “normality” is unproblematic. Normality as a way to ground judgments concerning distributive justice in health care is often helpful in cases when there is a consensus about what role health care ought to play in individuals’ lives and what conditions are considered diseases. Concerning the neurodiverse, however, specifically individuals with Asperger’s syndrome (AS), utilizing normal as a baseline for judgments in health care can be detrimental to making mental health care available to individuals whose place within the spectrum of “normality” is unclear, yet can reasonably be expected to benefit from mental health therapy. Many explanations of “normal” have been utilized by the sciences for purposes ranging from theoretically and clinically distinguishing “health” from “disease” to determine what conditions health insurance ought to fund. For example Wachbroit (1994) offers three different ways of understanding normality: 1) as a statistical concept in which what is normal is the mean of multiple items; 2) as societal norms, in which one’s culture determines what is normal, typically by distinguishing actions, behaviors, and viewpoints that are typical or common in that society from those actions, behaviors,