Introduction: Philosophy has created quite a narrow literature on HIV. This literature is mainly about the ethical problems – or rather it has been created in the field of medical ethics. This has been because of seeing the protection of the patient and others from AIDS, which is a special kind of infectious disease, as a major problem. The problems of the patient with AIDS was attributed at the social level to sociology and at the individual level to psychology. The aim of this paper is to discuss whether AIDS has philosophical problems that could not be confined only to medical ethics.

Theses:

1. The most important problem that a patient with AIDS faces at the social level is discrimination. Discrimination towards HIV cannot be reduced to a discrimination due to homophobia and actually it is a fundamental discrimination which is created by the sterilization and hygiene culture. For this reason, distinguishing the discrimination towards HIV should be fundamentally a subject of the political philosophy.

2. The individual problem caused both by being subject to discrimination and more importantly by the knowledge about his/her finitude of life is something which is in an extent psychology cannot deal with: “destruction of the self”. This problem which we can describe not only as loosing self-respect but at the same time eradication of being a person is a problem of description of the self which is directly a problem of philosophy.

Conclusion: Discrimination and being at the boundary state should be studied as the crisis of the self of the patient with AIDS and this study should be based on listening to the stories of the patients with AIDS.