Addiction, identity, morality

Philosophica, 2022

In a recent article, Hannah Pickard has argued that in at least some paradigmatic cases, addicts value the ends they voluntarily pursue because they see them as part of their social identity. In this paper, I answer a question raised by this claim. If addictions involve exercising the capacity of choice so as to act towards ends for the sake of sustaining a social identity—and therefore involve the deployment of serious agential apparatus—how are we to hold on to the natural intuition that addiction is a form of disempowerment? I argue that some social identities enable, while others inhibit, an ability that is central to our agency: the ability to be oneself. On the basis of this distinction, I elaborate the hypothesis that the social identity ‘addict’ serves paradigmatically to impede the ability to be oneself. Thus, I aim to build upon Pickard’s analysis to explain how addictions can be severely disempowering despite deploying significant agential resources.

Noûs, 2020

Addiction is standardly characterized as a neurobiological disease of compulsion. Against this characterization, I argue that many cases of addiction cannot be explained without recognizing the value of drugs to those who are addicted; and I explore in detail an insufficiently recognized source of value, namely, a sense of self and social identity as an addict. For people who lack a genuine alternative sense of self and social identity, recovery represents an existential threat. Given that an addict identification carries expectations of continued consumption despite negative consequences, there is therefore a parsimonious explanation of why people who identify as addicts continue to use drugs despite these consequences: they self‐identify as addicts and that is what addicts are supposed to do. I conclude by considering how it is nonetheless possible to overcome addiction despite this identity, in part by imagining and enacting a new one. Importantly, this possibility requires the a...

The Sociological Quarterly, 1994

Recent advances in brain imaging methods as well as increased sophistication in neuroscientific modeling of the brain’s reward systems have facilitated the study of neural mechanisms associated with addiction such as processes associated with motivation, decision making, pleasure seeking, and inhibitory control. These scientific activities have increased optimism that the neurological underpinnings of addiction will be delineated, and that pharmaceuticals that target and change these mechanisms will by themselves facilitate early intervention and even full recovery. In this paper, we argue that it is misguided to construe addiction as just or primarily a brain-chemistry problem, which can be adequately treated by pharmaceutical interventions alone. Addiction affects the person as an embodied agent in the world, not just as a brain on a body’s shoulders. Addictive behaviour patterns involve not only brain chemistry, but an addict’s interpersonal relationships, social and physical environment, and personal identity, all of which contribute to habits that cause or perpetuate addiction. No doubt, drugs may be useful in treating some features of addiction. But unfettered optimism about pharmaceuticals in the treatment of addiction is scientifically unwarranted and therapeutically imprudent.

Addiction appears to be a deeply moralized concept. To understand the entwinement of addiction and morality, we briefly discuss the disease model and its alternatives in order to address the following questions: Is the disease model the only path towards a 'de-moralized' discourse of addiction? While it is tempting to think that medical language surrounding addiction provides liberation from the moralized language, evidence suggests that this is not necessarily the case. On the other hand non-disease models of addiction may seem to resuscitate problematic forms of the moralization of addiction, including, invoking blame, shame, and the wholesale rejection of addicts as people who have deep character flaws, while ignoring the complex biological and social context of addiction. This is also not necessarily the case. We argue that a deficit in reasons responsiveness as basis for attribu-tion of moral responsibility can be realized by multiple different causes, disease being one, but it also seems likely that alternative accounts of addiction as developed by Flanagan, Lewis, and Levy, may also involve mechanisms, psychological, social, and neurobiological that can diminish reasons responsiveness. It thus seems to us that nondisease models of addiction do not necessarily involve moralization. Hence, a non-stigmatizing approach to recovery can be realized in ways that are consistent with both the disease model and alternative models of addiction.

In “Addiction between Compulsion and Choice” Holton and Berridge attempt to compromise between the ordinary choice conception at one end, and the disease claim at the other end, two mutually exclusive positions that dominate the Moral Psychology debate on addiction. I argue that this apparent incompatability is due to a naturalistic conception of Personal Identity. I argue that if one adopts a Dualist conception, it would contribute towards a better understanding of addictive agent as "sick", without claiming that the agent no longer retains any self-control over his actions.

Addictive Behaviors, 1996

Addiction

Journal of Alcoholism Drug Abuse & Substance Dependence , 2019

The role of the other gives importance to understand the notion of addiction in the cultural and collective order that precipitates that the addiction itself has different edges and also urgent to be raised so that the understanding in the order of symptom is present, enable the devices of the Articulated addiction in the subjectivity of the subject multiplies the means to treat addictions. The problem of identity in the subject is given by aspects of placidity, a conflict is manifested In which for the subject it is necessary to know where it belongs or who it is, in the identity process the product of identification is numbered the possibility To make addiction is built to constitute the subject as the subject of himself. In this sense, the addict is a slave to himself effect addiction. Choosing a certain addiction seems to drag the problem that the subject is suffering from, that is, the addiction is the door to the backyard of the vestige, it is the effect of an underlying problem destabilized and at the high point of such evil /being, the addiction is It becomes a substitute for what the subject has lost from identification.