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.
Similar content being viewed by others
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Räikkä, J. The social concept of disease. Theor Med Bioeth 17, 353–361 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00489680
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00489680