Addiction & agency
Does rejecting disease remoralize addiction?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Moralization and stigma persist despite the disease model; alternative models (Flanagan, Lewis, Levy) can treat responsibility without sliding back into blame.
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
This is conceptual, not a new stigma survey. Medicalization is flagged as future work. It does not prove any model uniquely destigmatises.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
Several papers reject the slogan that only a chronic brain-disease story can fight stigma or explain compulsion.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
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Same topic cluster — not a recommendation engine.