title: The social concept of disease.
abstract: In the discussion of such social questions as "how should alcoholics be treated by society?" and "what kind of people are responsible in the face of the law?", is "disease" a value-free or value-laden notion, a natural or a normative one? It seems, for example, that by the utterance "alcoholism should be classified as a disease' we mean something like the following: the condition called alcoholism is similar in morally relevant respects to conditions that we uncontroversially label diseases, and therefore we have a moral obligation to consider alcoholism a disease. So there are grounds to think that, in the discussion of social questions, our concept of disease is strongly value-laden. However, it does not follow that the medical concept of disease is likewise value-laden. In this paper I distinguish between the medical and social concepts of disease, arguing that the naturalist-normativist debate is concerned with the former, but not the latter. Therefore, we need not settle the naturalist-normativist debate in order to conclude that the social concept of disease is value-laden.
authors.affiliation: University of Turku Department of Philosophy, Finland.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Räikkä
mesh_terms: D000437:Alcoholism; D003210:Concept Formation; D004194:Disease / Q000145:classification*; D006801:Humans; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D012945:Social Values; D009626:Terminology as Topic