THE SOCIAL CONCEPT OF DISEASE

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 not ion, a natural or a normative one? It seems, for example, that by the utterance 'alcoholism should be classified as a disease' we mean somet hing like the following: the condition called alcoholism is similar in morally relevant respects to conditions that we uncontroversially lab el diseases, and therefore we have a moral obligation to consider alco holism a disease. So there are grounds to think that, in the discussio n of social questions, our concept of disease is strongly value-laden. However, it does not follow that the medical concept of disease is li kewise value-laden. In this paper I distinguish between the medical an d 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 conclud e that the social concept of disease is value-laden.