Towards A Compassionate Ethics Of Addiction

Abstract

Questions of moral responsibility have traditionally been oriented towards choice and free will. That is, we assume that to know if someone should be held morally responsible to a full extent, we need to know how much control they had over their choice to commit an immoral act. I contend that the ability to do otherwise is not at the center of moral responsibility, especially in the case of addiction. Addiction probably does not produce compulsions of the sort that actually remove the ability to do otherwise. It may impact addicted people’s ability to think clearly or to reason well. However, what makes people with addiction less morally responsible is not that their addiction impacts their ability to reason, but that their addiction creates new motivations and reasons to act in certain ways, motivation and reasons which overpower the other ones available to them. It is important for us to build our philosophical accounts of addiction in a way that recognizes this competition around reasons and affirms that addicted people are whole and complex.