Relating Addiction to Disease, Disability, Autonomy, and the Good Life

摘要

We thank all three commentators for extremely constructive, insightful, and gracious commentaries. We cannot address all their valuable points. In this response, we elucidate and relate the concepts of addiction, disease, disability, autonomy, and well-being. We examine some of the implications of these relationships in the context of the helpful responses made by our commentators. We begin with the definitions of the relevant concepts which we employ: Addiction (Liberal Concept): An addiction is a strong appetite. Appetites: An appetite is a disposition that generates desires that are urgent, oriented toward some rewarding behavior, periodically recurring, often in predictable circumstances, sated temporarily by their fulfillment, and generally provide pleasure. Disease (Naturalistic Concept): A disease is some biological or psychological state that results in subfunctioning of the organism in a given set of environmental and social circumstances, C. The reference class is a natural class of organisms of uniform functional design; specifically, an age group of a sex of a species. A normal function is a part or process within members of the reference class and is a statistically typical contribution by it to their individual survival and reproduction (Boorse 1977,1997).