There aren't many clerics around here, so I call many of my conversations with people Davos confessionals, where they say "I have some moral qualms about this" or "I'm from a Catholic background, I'm not religious now, but there's moral disease".
It is as though both men want not merely to disassemble the reputation of their homeland as a model — the model — of benign social democracy but to dig backward in a bid to prove that the past, too, was not one of liberal health and justice but a sump of buried transgressions and moral disease.
Genetic tests have moved obesity from being a moral disease (weakness of the will) to a genetic disease, and bariatric surgery has made it a surgical or metabolic disease – altering both its status, prestige, and stigma.
He would ask me constantly, "Do you think I'm being punished?" And I said, "No, this is not a moral disease; they're saying it's a virus".
American conservatism, for the most part, has defined itself in opposition to fascism, and America itself has long stood as an example and warning to the rest of the world: an unwavering, embodied proclamation that this moral disease will not be tolerated.
AIDS was still perceived as an avoidable "moral disease" associated with unacceptable sexual behaviour and PLHA were consequently judged to be personally responsible for contracting HIV.
However "blaming" stigma - where people living with HIV were considered responsible for acquiring a "moral disease" - persisted in the community and anticipating it was a key barrier to disclosure and VCT uptake.
Widening inequality, rising poverty, consumerism, decline of public trust, class snobbery, family breakdown – all symptoms of the same disease: "moral individualism".
The rapacious trajectory of the poet's appetite for sex and celebrity makes him a poster boy for what his contemporary and countryman Dr. J. C. Prichard termed "moral insanity" — a disease of the passions that left the intellect intact while "the individual is... incapable... of conducting himself with decency and propriety in the business of life".
The way Cardano insists on the severe reality of mental pain (molestia animi, dolor animi) is one of the most characteristic aspects of his moral philosophy: "No disease, if there is not fear of death, can equal mental pain (dolor animi)" (De utilitate, OO, II, 18a).
