Does rejecting disease remoralize addiction?
Moralization and stigma persist despite the disease model; alternative models (Flanagan, Lewis, Levy) can treat responsibility without sliding back into blame.
Source
Addiction and Moralization: the Role of the Underlying Model of Addiction
What they did
The authors define moralization, ask whether the disease model really disentangles addiction from morals, and compare Flanagan’s twin normative failure, Lewis’s learning model, and Levy’s defect-of-agency model, focusing on reasons-responsiveness and moral responsibility.
What they found
Stigma persists despite the disease model’s prevalence. Further moralization would likely worsen law and public health. Reasons-responsiveness shows responsibility conditions are complex; one can reject disease without treating addiction as simple vice.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This is conceptual, not a new stigma survey. Medicalization is flagged as future work. It does not prove any model uniquely destigmatises.
Key terms
- Moralization
- Treating a condition as a matter of vice, blame and character rather than (only) health.
- Brain disease model
- Addiction as chronic compulsive brain disease with loss of self-control.
- Reasons-responsiveness
- A condition of moral responsibility: sensitivity to reasons.
- Medicalization
- Recasting a problem as medical; can overlap with or differ from moralization.
Flashcards
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
Stigma under the disease model?
Common questions
Does the disease model kill stigma?
No. The authors say stigma persists despite it.
Must anti-disease views be moralizing?
Not if they handle responsibility carefully, as in the three alternatives discussed.
Why care about moralization?
It harms people and is itself a topic for normative ethics.
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