Can addiction be credibly invoked as an excuse for moral harms secondary to particular decisions to use drugs? This question raises two distinct sets of issues. First, there is the question of whether addiction is the sort of consideration that could, given suitable assumptions about the details of the case, excuse or mitigate moral blameworthiness. Most discussions of addiction and moral responsibility have focused on this question, and many have argued that addiction excuses. Here I articulate what I take to (...) be the best argument for this view, based on the substantial difficulty that people with severe addiction experience in controlling drug-related behavior. This, I argue, may in some cases be sufficient to ground a mitigating excuse, given the way in which addiction undermines agents’ responsiveness to relevant moral reasons to do otherwise. Much less attention has been devoted to a second set of issues that critically affect the possibility of applying this mitigating excuse in particular cases, derived from the ambivalent nature of agential control in addiction. In order to find a fitting response to moral harm, the person with the right standing to blame must make a judgment about the extent to which the agent possessed certain morally relevant capacities at the time of the act. In practice, this will often prove tremendously difficult to assess. The ethical challenge for the person with the right standing to blame is fundamentally one of making a judgment about matters that seem underdetermined by the available evidence. (shrink)

This article critically interrogates contemporary forms of addiction medicine that are portrayed by policy-makers as providing a ‘rational’ or politically neutral approach to dealing with drug use and related social problems. In particular, it examines the historical origins of the biological facts that are today understood to provide a foundation for contemporary understandings of addiction as a ‘disease of the brain’. Drawing upon classic and contemporary work on ‘styles of thought’, it documents how, in the period between the mid-1960s and (...) the mid-1970s, such facts emerged in relation to new neurobiological styles of explaining and managing social problems associated with drug abuse, and an alliance between a relatively marginal group of researchers and American policy-makers who were launching the ‘War on Drugs’. Beyond illustrating the political and material conditions necessary for the rise of addiction neuroscience, the article highlights the productivity of neurobiological thought styles, by focusing on the new biological objects, treatments and hopes that have emerged within the field of addiction studies over the last several decades. (shrink)

The exercise of synchronic self-control is the way in which an actor can attempt to bring a desire into alignment with his better judgement at the moment and during the interval of time over which, but for the exercise of such self-control, the desire would become the actor’s preponderant desire, which the actor would then translate into an act contrary to his better judgment. The moral psychology of an actor who fails to achieve such self-control can be analyzed in two (...) ways. One way is meant to be consistent with compatibilist metaphysics; the other with libertarian metaphysics. The implications of these analyses for the criminal law are complicated, but perhaps the most important is this: the criminal law should in principle recognize a partial excuse for an actor who exercises synchronic self-control but who gives up his effort because he believes that he can no longer continue to resist. His effort to achieve self-control thus fails, and he ends up translating into action the very desire he set out to control. (shrink)

In this article, I survey four key questions about willpower: How is willpower possible? Why does willpower fail? How does willpower relate to other self-regulatory processes? and What are the connections between willpower and weakness of will? Empirical research into willpower is growing rapidly and yielding some fascinating new findings. This survey emphasizes areas in which empirical progress in understanding willpower helps to advance traditional philosophical debates.

How to respond justly to the dangers persistent violent offenders present is a vexing moral and legal issue. On the one hand, we wish to reduce predation; on the other, we want to treat predators fairly. The central theme of this paper is that it is difficult to achieve both goals without compromising one of them, and that both are being seriously undermined. I begin by explaining the legal theory, doctrine and practice governing dangerous offenders and demonstrate that the law (...) leaves a gap in the ability to confine them. Next I explore the means by which the law has overtly or covertly sought to fill the gap. Many of these measures, especially the new form of civil commitment for sexual predators, dangerously conflate moral and medical categories. I conclude that pure preventive detention is more common than we usually assume, but that this practice violates fundamental assumptions concerning liberty under the American constitutional regime. (shrink)

How to respond justly to the dangers persistent violent offenders present is a vexing moral and legal issue. On the one hand, we wish to reduce predation; on the other, we want to treat predators fairly. The central theme of this paper is that it is difficult to achieve both goals without compromising one of them, and that both are being seriously undermined. I begin by explaining the legal theory, doctrine and practice governing dangerous offenders and demonstrate that the law (...) leaves a gap in the ability to confine them. Next I explore the means by which the law has overtly or covertly sought to fill the gap. Many of these measures, especially the new form of civil commitment for sexual predators, dangerously conflate moral and medical categories. I conclude that pure preventive detention is more common than we usually assume, but that this practice violates fundamental assumptions concerning liberty under the American constitutional regime. (shrink)

In this article I address the question of what makes addiction morally problematic, and seek to answer it by drawing on values salient in the sub-Saharan African philosophical tradition. Specifically, I appeal to life-force and communal relationship, each of which African philosophers have at times advanced as a foundational value, and spell out how addiction, or at least salient instances of it, could be viewed as unethical for flouting them. I do not seek to defend either vitality or community as (...) the best explanation of when and why addiction is immoral, instead arguing that each of these characteristically African values grounds an independent and plausible account of that. I conclude that both vitalism and communalism merit consideration as rivals to accounts that Western ethicists would typically make, according to which addiction is immoral insofar as it degrades rationality or autonomy, as per Kantianism, or causes pain or dissatisfaction, à la utilitarianism. (shrink)

The current debate on recreational drug policy is roughly a contest between prohibition advocates and legalization advocates. This paper offers a third alternative that is a compromise between those two. The centralized-use compromise can secure the autonomy interests that are important to defenders of legalization, and it can prevent harms to others that are the focus of prohibition arguments. The centralized-use compromise also offers a possible way to reduce the black market while also reducing the rate of addiction and the (...) associated debasing harms to self. (shrink)

This article explores the philosophical concept of akrasia, also known as weakness of will, and demonstrates its relevance to clinical practice. In particular, it challenges an implicit notion of control over one’s actions that might impede recovery from substance misuse. Reflecting on three fictional case vignettes, we show how philosophical work on akrasia helps avoid this potentially harmful notion of control by supporting a holistic engagement with people for whom substance misuse is a problem. We argue that such engagement enhances (...) their prospects of recovery by focusing on agency over time, as opposed to individual lapses. (shrink)