Addiction as Entrenchment

Addiction, responsibility, and choice

Somebody asked, “Is addiction actually a choice or is that just what people tell themselves?” While my response is awaiting approval, I am pasting it below, lightly edited.

Judging by some of the other answers, most people who claim that addicts have no choice mention genes or neuroscience. In my opinion, your genes and your brain are limited factors in your decision making.

Genes are relatively easy to override (think bungee jumping vs inborn fear of heights, hunger strikes, etc). Culture is far harder to resist (eg peer pressure). But still, even if someone’s alcoholism started because they were pressured into drinking, they still made the choice to cave in. Once someone is addicted, it may be hard to stop, but it was still their choice to start whatever behavior became the addiction. I think that would be different only in cases where somebody physically jammed a heroin needle into your arm against your will, say, and got you hooked that way.

Ultimately, people are moral agents with ideas, preferences, and, most importantly, free will. Those are the important concepts when it comes to addiction. People cannot be reduced to their genes or their brains; they’re not ‘brain machines’ or ‘gene machines’, mindlessly enacting their brains’ or genes’ bidding. You can make a choice that limits your free will down the line, but that’s still your choice. And it’s free will that enables addicts to break the cycle. Taking that away from them by telling them it’s just their brains, they can’t help it, may actually make it harder to solve the addiction.

Your question brings up the issue of responsibility and guilt. Morality and responsibility require choice.

I view addiction as an entrenched conflict between an addict’s preferences. That’s why addicts flip flop between behaviors and become their own adversaries. Reading some of the accounts of addiction here on Quora (eg here), it seems as though addicts end up behaving like split people. They try to curb their addiction by putting up obstacles for themselves; after some time passes, they remove those obstacles and ‘indulge’. Then they go back and try more difficult obstacles, which they later remove anyway, and so on. This constant back and forth frustrates both parts and worsens the addiction over time.

If addiction really is caused by an entrenched conflict between preferences, the addict should be able to solve it by creating what’s known as a common preference. It’s a concept usually reserved to solve conflicts between people, but I think it applies just the same to conflicts within a single person. If the addict can create a new option that both sides of him prefer to their initial position, then his addiction should vanish fairly quickly because neither side has a reason to continue holding its original preference. So the conflict, and with it, the addiction, should just… go away.

For example, an addict from Quora complains about his inability to stay off certain websites. One preference of his is to return to those websites repeatedly, while another is to avoid them (and do something else instead). So he blocks the sites, then unblocks them, and so on. If he can come up with a third option both sides of him prefer, such as reading or writing a book, or analyzing movies, or going hunting, or whatever it may be, then he will solve his addiction. But is has to be something both parts of him prefer. It can’t just be more self-coercion – then it won’t work.

Somebody may make a choice that leads to addiction, realize his mistake, and try to correct it. If he makes a reasonable effort – or, as may be required for severe addictions, a near-exhaustive effort – to correct that mistake by coming up with new options both sides of him may prefer, then I think he is morally in the clear, even if he fails. People are fallible; they make mistakes all the time, even bad ones, but they can learn from their mistakes.

However, if he doesn’t even try, or if he evades the issue and pretends nothing is wrong, then he is morally guilty.