Recent work on addiction and responsible agency

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 178-221

  Yaffe, Gideon ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 52849114768     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2001.00178.x     Document Type: Article

References (98)

1. Recent discussions of policy issues about addiction are not discussed here, although there is very interesting work on the topic to be found. Cf. Helge Waal, "To Legalize or Not to Legalize: Is That the Question?" in GH, pp. 137-72;
2. Douglas N. Husak, Drugs and Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
3. Husak, "Addiction and Criminal Liability" in LP 18 (1999): 655-84.
4. Gary Watson, "Disordered Appetites" in AEE, p. 7.
5. One naïve way to make good on the thought that addiction undermines freedom would be to argue for the claim that addicts are compelled to do what they do in something like the way in which a man falling from a bridge is compelled to hit the water. That is, we might think that addiction takes control of our bodies independently of our wills rather than inducing irresistible desires. In the popular imagination, this conception of the addict's behavior is encouraged by recent discoveries in neurobiology mapping the neurological effects of drug consumption. (For a useful survey of recent research of this sort see Eliot Gardner and James David, "The Neurobiology of Chemical Addiction" in GH, pp. 93-136.)
6. But it is only when mind-body relations are understood very naïvely that such results are taken to indicate any such thing. After all, even deliberate action typical of free agency must have some kind of neurological basis. Besides, it runs directly contrary to the phenomenology of addiction to suggest that the cravings felt by addicts play no role in generating their behavior. For closely related remarks, and helpful discussion of the limitations of the disease model of addiction, see Stephen J. Morse, "Hooked on Hype: Addiction and Responsibility," LP 19 (2000): 3-49.
7. One of the best known ways of accounting for the diminished responsibility of addicts appears in Harry Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 11-25.
8. Frankfurt's explanation depends on both a controversial conception of freedom and a controversial conception of addiction. Freedom of the sort that addiction undermines, according to Frankfurt, is enjoyed by an agent just in case the motivational efficacy of her first order desire depends upon her wanting that first order desire to be efficacious. Frankfurt takes the addicted agent to be such that her first order desire for that to which she is addicted will be effective regardless of whether or not she wants it to be. There is a substantial literature assessing both of these aspects of Frankfurt's position, the examination of which would take us too far afield. For helpful discussion and an overview, see Gary Watson, "Free Action and Free Will" in Mind 96 (1987): 145-72 (esp. pp. 147-53).
9. See also Olav Gjelsvik, "Freedom of the Will and Addiction" in AEE, pp. 29-54.
10. A certain sort of ethical rationalist will deny that there is any immoral behavior that is fully rational. But even ethical rationalists of this sort think that immoral behavior could be the product of processes that are "rational" in some sense of the term. Such rationalists, for instance, can distinguish between instrumentally or procedurally rational and irrational immoral conduct. So, the approach under discussion for accounting for the responsibility-undermining force of addiction is open to ethical rationalists.
11. Self-deception may play an important role in many addictions. The alcoholic may drink, for instance, believing that he must since it would be rude not to toast his host when, in fact, the host couldn't care less and he is really drinking to satisfy his craving. This essay doesn't discuss issues of cognitive irrationality but focuses, instead, on the way in which one can choose, or be motivated to choose, irrationally even while having rational beliefs. For an important recent discussion of self-deception see Alfred Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
12. Another way of pursuing this deflationary approach starts with the thought that addicts are usually responsible for the fact that they are addicted, and so the fact that addictive behavior is irrational does not ameliorate the addict's responsibility. Such views encounter a variety of obstacles; perhaps the most important is this: People are very often excused from responsibility for behavior springing from conditions acquired voluntarily. The responsibility of a parent who takes objectionable steps to prevent separation from a child is diminished. But a parent's attachment to a child is no less voluntarily acquired than many addictions. For further discussion, see Section III.
13. Becker's overall approach is expressed in his The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976).
14. The approach is applied to addiction in Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy, "A Theory of Rational Addiction," Journal of Political Economy 96 (1998): 675-700.
15. Also relevant is Gary Becker, Michael Grossman and Kevin Murphy, "Rational Addiction and the Effect of Price on Consumption" in Choice Over Time (henceforth CT), George Loewenstein and Jon Elster eds. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992).
16. Becker's derivation of this implication is summarized very nicely in Ole-Jørgen Skog, "Rationality, Irrationality and Addiction - Reflections on Becker and Murphy's Theory of Addiction" in GH, pp. 173-207. Skog's simplified presentation of Becker's position is an important contribution to the philosophical literature on addiction and rationality, since Becker's own presentation of his view relies on mathematical reasoning that few philosophers are able to follow. The presentation of Becker's position offered in the main text differs from Skog's only in style.
17. Things will be more complicated if tolerance or reinforcement have a tendency to subside. Depending on how quickly one can bounce back to default welfare levels in the absence of use, it might be rational to use for a few days and then stop, thereby reaping the benefits of use without eroding the expected utility of abstention to the point at which the use itself was not worthwhile.
18. Elster, SF, p. 146. As discussed in Section III, in connection with Elster's own positive view of addiction, the opinion Elster offers is consistent with the view, which he also holds, that a tendency to discount the future can be irrational by virtue of its causes. But Elster does hold that a tendency to steeply discount the future is not irrational merely by virtue of its steepness. The last sentence of the quotation seems to be offering the following, unsound argument: "(P1) Someone's preference for the present is irrational only if that person could be motivated to correct it. (P2) Someone who is motivated to have a preference for the future over the present already has that preference. (Conclusion) A preference for the present is never irrational; one could never both have such a preference and be motivated to correct it." The argument is unsound since P2 is certainly false, and P1 may be false. P2 is false, since one can be motivated to acquire a preference one lacks by many things other than the preference one is aiming to acquire; for instance, one can have a second-order preference for having a particular preference without already having the preferred preference. A person might wish, that is, that she cared more about the future without thereby caring about the future in much the same way as she might prefer that she preferred spinach to ice cream rather than the reverse without thereby preferring spinach to ice cream at all. P1 is probably false as well. At least, a claim like P1 about rational belief would clearly be false: one can have an irrational belief while lacking any kind of motivation to correct it. Why should the irrationality of a preference require motivation to correct it when the irrationality of a belief does not?
19. Rational choice theorists usually justify the assumption that rational agents discount the future exponentially on the grounds that exponential discounters can turn those who discount nonexponentially into money pumps. This is a consequence of the fact that nonexponential discounters may suffer flip-flops in preference during which time they will be willing to buy goods at rates higher than those at which they are willing to sell the same goods at different times. The inconsistency in one's preferences over time, that is, can make one into an economic victim of those with temporally consistent preferences. However, to avoid being a money pump, one needs only to have temporally consistent preferential rankings. An agent who discounts the future linearly, for instance, will, like the exponential discounter, enjoy such consistency. So, the fact that rational agents are not money pumps does not provide a justification for the claim that rational agents discount exponentially rather than discounting in any other temporally consistent manner.
20. Skog, "Rationality, Irrationality and Addiction - Reflections on Becker and Murphy's Theory of Addiction," pp. 185-86.
21. Olav Gjelsvik, "Addiction, Weakness of the Will and Relapse" in GH, pp. 48-49. Becker may have room to respond to Gjelsvik's criticism. After all, Becker points out that there is no reason to think that the degree to which an agent discounts the future should remain constant. (Gary Becker, Michael Grossman and Kevin Murphy, "Rational Addiction and the Effect of Price on Consumption," p. 329; quoted in Elster and Skog's introduction to GH, p. 24.) It is quite possible that an addict may quit when she comes to discount the future less steeply and will relapse when she returns to her usual manner of discounting.
22. George Ainslie, "A Research-Based Theory of Addictive Motivation," LP 19 (2000): 83;
23. George Ainslie, "idem, BW, p. 18.
24. In addition, since rational choice theorists assume that there can be no distinction between what one judges to be best and what one is most motivated to pursue, it is very difficult for the rational choice theorist to account for weakness of will at a particular point in time. Given that assumption, how can an agent authentically judge one thing to be best and yet do another? For a related point, see Ainslie, BW, pp. 24-26.
25. See also Gjelsvik, "Adduction, Weakness of Will and Relapse," pp. 49-52.
26. See Jon Elster, "Gambling and Addiction" in GH, pp. 208-34 (esp. pp. 215-17);
27. and Jon Elster, "idem, SF, pp. 65-66 . The point is, perhaps, even clearer in the case of certain eating disorders. The same degree of food deprivation has the same effect in decreasing a person's weight, even if she has been depriving herself in the past. Thus, at least one way of understanding tolerance cannot be naturally applied to anorexics and bulimics. There may be other possibilities. For instance, perhaps the more the anorexic has deprived herself in the past the more weightloss she requires to feel the same level of relief.
28. One way in which Becker's model has been extended is by showing that a tendency to steeply discount future goods is not the only mechanism that can lead a rational drug user into a lifestyle of destructively high consumption. Richard Herrnstein and Drazen Prelec, "A Theory of Addiction" in CT, pp. 331-60 show for instance, that destructively high levels of consumption can be reached by an otherwise rational drug user who ignores the fact that her behavior will lead to addiction.
29. Such an agent need not discount future goods that she correctly anticipates. Instead, she ends up in a pattern of high consumption by failing to anticipate the effects of tolerance or reinforcement. There will be cases in which the kind of addiction-producing mechanism that Herrnstein and Prelec identify involves self-deception and so the resulting situation cannot be characterized as "rational addiction." Also, Athanasios Orphanides and David Zervos have shown that a lifestyle of destructively high consumption can be reached by a rational drug user who doesn't entirely ignore the possibility that she will become addicted, but underestimates the chances that the substance she consumes will cause tolerance and reinforce its own consumption through threat of withdrawal. (Athanasios Orphanides and David Zervos, "Rational Addiction with Learning and Regret," Journal of Political Economy 103 [1995]: 739-58.)
30. Karl Ove Moene, "Addiction and Social Interaction" in GH, pp. 30-46.
31. The similarities in structure between Moene's view and Becker's make Moene's theory subject to some of the same criticisms that have been launched against Becker's view. In particular, Skog's point that "high levels of consumption" and "low levels of consumption" are too gross measures by which to distinguish addicts from nonaddicts applies equally to Moene's model of social consumption. A society could have what is, by ordinary standards, a low level of consumption of a substance whose use is subject to the social constraints Moene imagines even though there is a yet lower stable level of consumption that could be reached if social pressures weighed differently than they actually do. Should we say that this would be a society of drug abusers? To do so would be to distort our ordinary concept of drug abuse, or addiction. In addition, the sort of criticism developed above in the main text (under which an agent's tendencies to discount the future are rationally assessible) can be extended to Moene's theory. Perhaps there are rational ways for encounters between those who prefer use and those who prefer abstention to be settled. Whether or not this is so is a difficult problem in bargaining theory, but it is not clear that there are no rational standards to be brought to bear in the adjudication of disputes between those with conflicting preferences. However, whatever problems the theory might encounter when interpreted as a general model of an addictive society of rational agents are irrelevant to the main purpose of Moene's theory, which is to model the way in which social factors can result in less than optimal equilibria of usage, the question of the rationality or irrationality of the members of the society being orthogonal to this question.
32. See Moene, "Addiction and Social Interaction," pp. 38-40 for a discussion of the implication of drug costs given his model.
33. Ainslie has expressed his theory of motivation in a variety of places. Cf. "Derivation of 'Rational' Economic Behavior from Hyperbolic Discount Curves" in American Economic Review 81 (1991): 334-40;
34. Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States Within the Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
35. "The Dangers of Willpower A Picoeconomic Understanding of Addiction and Dissociation" in GH, pp. 65-92;
36. "The Intuitive Explanation of Passionate Mistakes, and Why it's Not Adequate" in AEE, pp. 209-38;
37. "A Research-Based Theory of Addictive Motivation"; BW.
38. In addition, unlike the exponential discounter, the hyperbolic discounter can be turned into a money pump by buying goods from her before she is in the grip of a craving and selling them back to her at inflated rates when the craving strikes.
39. This possibility is not as analytically puzzling as it might appear. The possibility can be accounted for in a number of ways, most notably for our purposes by specifying distinct kinds of "wants." See Section III.
40. Thomas Schelling, "Self-Command: A New Discipline," in CT, p. 167.
41. See, particularly, Ainslie, BW, pp. 78-88.
42. For another discussion of Ainslie's view of will power see, Ole-Jørgen Skog, "Hyperbolic Discounting, Willpower, and Addiction" in AEE, pp. 151-68.
43. Howard Rachlin, The Science of Self-Control (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), thinks of successful exercises of self-control as the initiation of patterns of behavior that supplant other, less healthy, patterns. Although Rachlin places no strong emphasis on the preference shifts experienced by hyperbolic discounters, he does take hyperbolic discounting seriously, and there are strong affinities between his views and Ainslie's. In addition, Rachlin's book is of particular interest for its thorough examination of recent empirical work in behavioral psychology regarding the effectiveness of various techniques for overcoming patterns of unhealthy behavior.
44. Ainslie holds that the belief that one's present choice is decisive evidence about what one will choose in the future is self-fulfilling: if one has it, then it is more likely to be true than if one lacks it. (See BW, p. 88.) However, even if the belief does sometimes cause the conditions that make it true, this fact is only relevant if the causal chain passes in the right way through the agent's capacities for rationality. This point is elaborated below in the main text.
45. Michael Bratman, "Planning and Temptation" in Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 35-57.
46. Alfred Mele, "Addiction and Self-Control," Behavior and Philosophy, 24 (1996): 99-117 (henceforth BP).
47. Both Mele and Bratman in his description of Mele's examples (see Bratman, "Planning and Temptation," p. 49 n. 21) talk about past abstention as providing an agent with a reason to abstain by encouraging her that she will refrain in the future and thereby reap the benefits of continued abstention. Notice, however, that the encouragement provided by past abstention is not crucial to such examples. All that matters is that one cannot gain the goods promised by past abstention if one doesn't abstain now, and so the fact that one abstained in the past gives one further reason to abstain now. Anticipating this gives one's earlier self a reason to abstain that is rooted in the expectation that one's future self will appreciate the reason-giving force of one's abstention now and, therefore, will abstain.
48. Contestants on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" face situations of this sort. With each right answer the possible reward increases, but with a single wrong answer the contestant leaves with some lower reward. So, a contestant who has answered enough questions correctly will have to choose between answering a question or not answering it where a correct answer earns him $1,000,000; not answering will earn him $500,000; and answering incorrectly will earn him only $32,000. In choosing whether or not to answer the question, the contestant is given an incentive, the possibility of leaving with $1,000,000, to risk wasting his past correct answers, which are worth $468,000.
49. Mele has also argued that the kinds of cases in which Ainslie's "personal rules" do provide a rational agent with the tools for resisting present temptation - those in which to violate the rule would be to waste past efforts that led to successfully following it - are closer to the predicament of the addict than the kinds of cases in which personal rules do no good (BP, 107). Mele is probably right about this in the case of nicotine, but it is less clear in the case of other more dramatically and immediately damaging drugs. The primary problem with smoking is the long term negative effects on one's health. Further, the nicotine addict knows that a week of abstention will do little for his long term health if he returns to smoking today. That is, the value of past abstention is lost at the point of relapse. The smoker who quit and starts again goes back to "square one." (This may be even dearer in cases of compulsive overeating.) But compare the case of nicotine to the case of crack. While it's true that some of the goods of past abstention are lost with relapse - abstention from crack does have an incremental positive effect on long term health that can be ruined by relapse - these goods are minor compared to other goods obtained through abstention the acquisition of which do not depend on past abstention. By abstaining today, for instance, the crack addict avoids the degrading things that she does for another hit once she has run out of money to pay for it. These goods are gained just by abstaining now, and do not depend on past abstention. In cases of this sort, Ainslie's model of the mechanism of willpower cannot help a rational agent to overcome temptation, and for the reasons that Bratman suggests. While the fact of past abstention might give the agent some reason to abstain now, it is a very weak reason indeed and not one that will support an earlier expectation of later abstention. If anything will prevent the crack addict from giving in to temptation, it must be reflection on the horrible things that she will do for more once in the grip of the drug. But if she discounts these evils hyperbolically, as on Ainslie's model, there is no reason to think a rational agent capable of giving them the weight in her present deliberations needed to topple the attractions of use.
50. Ainslie discussed the negative side-effects of willpower in Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States within the Person, cf. pp. 205-13.
51. His examination of these negative side-effects has been substantially extended in his more recent work. See, especially, "The Dangers of Willpower: A Picoeconomic Understanding of Addiction and Dissociation" and BW, pp. 143-97
52. BW, pp. 48-51.
53. In a fascinating section of BW (pp. 54-61), Ainslie argues that pains are addictions in which the temporal gap between cravings is almost instantaneous. Thus, Ainslie thinks of pain, addiction and compulsion as being on a continuum.
54. What Ainslie is offering here is closely analogous to a well-known criticism of Kantian ethics, namely, that the rule-based conception of the best life that the Kantian advocates results in an inappropriate subordination of one's own personal projects and interests.
55. There are a wide variety of different ways to account for the connection between the will and rationality. At the extreme, we might think, as Kant did, that to will is to direct conduct in accordance with categorical principles of action dictated by the very nature of practical reason. (Cf. Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], esp. Lecture 3.)
56. At the other extreme is a view that accounts for the difference between will and desire by taking the will to be a special species of desire and then arguing that the species-defining characteristic suggests that acts of will are connected with our capacities for rationality in a way in which other desires are not. One might, for instance, associate the will with the strongest desire and then argue that there are rational grounds to act in accordance with the strongest desire that do not apply to desires across the board. Or, more promisingly, one might associate the will with the desire to act in accordance with reasons. (Cf. J. David Velleman, "What Happens When Someone Acts?" in Perspectives on Moral Responsibility, John Fischer and Mark Ravizza eds. [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993], pp. 188-210.)
57. Between these two extremes are a variety of other positions. One might, for instance, take acts of will to be mental states distinct from desire that play certain special roles in practical reason, and thus are governed by principles of rationality that do not govern desires, without thereby associating the will with practical reason itself. (Cf. Michael Bratman, "Toxin, Temptation and the Stability of Intention" in Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency, pp. 58-90.) Clearly, a full discussion of these issues cannot be undertaken here.
58. R. Jay Wallace, "Addiction as Defect of Will," LP 18: 621-54, suggests that no account of addictive motivation will be adequate that fails to give a special motivational role to the will as a motivating capacity different from desire. In arguing for this claim, he writes that by exercising the will, ". . . persons can bring about a kind of rational action that is not merely due to fortuitious coincidence of rational judgment and given desire, but that is a manifestation of the very capacities that make them, distinctively, agents." (pp. 637-38).
59. There is room in Ainslie's theory to pull these two things apart, but there is not room to do so while giving any meaningful motivational role to evaluations. An agent might judge a future good to be worth a merely exponentially discounted value, while "feeling" attracted to it to a hyperbolically discounted degree. However, Ainslie is committed to the claim that it is only the hyperbolically discounted feeling that actually influences present behavior. The exponentially discounted judgment does not compete in the marketplace of motivation.
60. Sometimes the assumption is thought to be essential to a naturalistic conception of human motivation. It is sometimes thought, that is, that a causal theory of the motivational role of evaluations requires an equation between one's preferences and one's judgments. Alfred Mele, Irrationality: An Essay on Akrasia, Self-Deception and Self-Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 31-49 argues for the compatibility of a causal theory of agency and the view that evaluative judgments have a different motivational role from one's desire-based preferences.
61. As an historical note, John Locke felt that motivation and evaluation had to be distinguished in order to account for cases of weakness of will. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Peter Nidditch ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 252-64 (book 2, chap. 21, sec. 35-47).
62. For discussion, see Gideon Yaffe, Liberty Worth the Name: Locke on Free Agency (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 32-61.
63. Loewenstein has presented his "visceral factors" view in a number of different places. Cf. "Out of Control: Visceral Influences on Behavior," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 65 (1996): 272-92;
64. "A Visceral Account of Addiction" in GH, pp. 235-64;
65. "Will-Power: A Decision Theorist's Perspective," LP 19 (1999): 51-76.
66. Cf. Elster, SF, pp. 31-35.
67. Cf. George Loewenstein, Daniel Nagin and Raymond Paternoster, "The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Predictions of Sexual Forcefulness," Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 3-4 (1997): 443-73.
68. Elster, then, would agree that a tendency to discount the future can count as irrational if it is a product of a nonrational, visceral motive, even though he thinks that tendencies to discount the future cannot count as irrational merely because of their "steepness," or some other feature of the temporal discounting function.
69. Things are complicated by the fact that compulsions will often "hijack" appetites. So, for instance, the compulsive overeater may experience the compulsive desire as an appetite. Still, in such cases the deepest motivation for the behavior is not appetitive.
70. Gary Watson, "Free Agency," Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 205-20.
71. Gary Watson, "Idem, "Free Action and Free Will," Mind 96 (1987): 149-50.
72. This problem is brought out very nicely in Kadri Vihvelin, "Stop Me Before I Kill Again," Philosophical Studies 75 (1994): 115-48. See esp. pp. 124-30.
73. Gary Watson, "Skepticism About Weakness of Will," Philosophical Review 86 (1977): 327, henceforth PR.
74. In this remark, Watson uses the term "the will" to refer to the agent's "practical judgment" (Gary Watson, "Philosophical Review 86 (1977): 327, ibid.), or her evaluation of what is, all things considered, best for her to do.
75. As Watson points out, proposals of this sort can be found in the literature. Cf. John Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 94.
76. Alfred Mele, "Irresistible Desires" in Nous 24 (1990): 455-72, makes a similar point in discussion of Wright Neely's closely related account of irresistible desire.
77. Neely says that a desire is irresistible if and only if an agent who recognized a good and sufficient reason not to act on it would still act on it ("Freedom and Desire," Philosophical Review 83 [1974]: 32-54).
78. But Mele points out that an agent's desire would then count as irresistible if the recognition of a good and sufficient reason not to act on it gave him a fatal heart attack (see Mele, "Irresistible Desires," p. 456). The point is very similar to Watson's: any counterfactual test must specify that the reason-action relation is normal in the counterfactual circumstance. But if we could specify what normality of this sort consists in we wouldn't need the counterfactual test in the first place.
79. Gary Watson, "Disordered Appetites," pp. 7-9. Here is another way to see the problem that Watson is raising: An analysis of the weak-compulsive distinction through appeal to susceptibility to countervailing reasons would have to overcome the fact that addicts are often susceptible to some countervailing reasons, even if they are not as susceptible as the rest of us; a sufficiently severe threat might keep the addict on course even if a weaker threat, sufficient to keep the unaddicted from using, wouldn't do the trick. But what is the difference between a weak countervailing reason and a strong one? The worry is that the distinction between strong and weak countervailing reasons is just the distinction between the compulsive and the weak reappearing in a different place.
80. Elster puts this test entirely in monetary terms: If the agent would act contrary to her desire when offered'a certain amount of money, or any greater amount, then she merely acts weakly. However, Elster proposes this as only a sufficient condition. (See Elster, SF, pp. 140-41.)
81. Alternative sufficient conditions could be devised for agents who don't care much about money, or who have reasons not to think better of more of it Whatever the reasons are that would draw an agent away from her desire, she must respond to such reasons in a coherent pattern. Someone might, for instance, choose contrary to her desire if offered $1,000 to do so, but not if offered $10,000 while still showing herself to be responsive to reasons; say she knows that after accepting money above $9,999 she would be audited by the IRS. In accordance with examples of this sort, a more general recipe for the construction of sufficient conditions is supplied in John Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 65-91.
82. In correspondence, Fischer has suggested that this problem could be overcome through appeal to a criterion of "mechanism individuation." For Fischer and Ravizza, that is, the relevant question is whether an agent who acted from the very same mechanism on which she actually acted would be moved by countervailing considerations. But, Fischer is suggesting, cases like the hydrophobic heroin addict might involve a switch in motivational mechanism. The mechanism that leads her to actually take heroin, that is, is not the same as the mechanism that leads her to choose not to when she would have to endure the water to do so. Fischer is well aware that there are serious challenges that an adequate criterion of mechanism individuation would have to meet. For our purposes here it is necessary to note only one: whatever criterion one produces it must not distinguish between the actual mechanism on which the heroin addict acts and the hydrophobic mechanism that would lead her not to choose to take heroin by appealing to the fact that the latter, and not the former, leads to compulsively made choices. To specify the criterion of individuation in this way would be to argue in the same viciously circular manner identified by Watson.
83. An important recent discussion of strength of motivation is Mele, "Motivational Strength," in Nous 32 (1998): 23-36.
84. See also Mele, "Strength of Motivation and Being in Control: Learning from Libet," in American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1997): 319-33.
85. See Watson, "Skepticism About Weakness of Will," p. 331,
86. and Watson, "idem "Disordered Appetites," p. 11.
87. Although Watson does make this proposal, he adds that he is "sure it is unsatisfactory as it stands." (Watson, "Disordered Appetites," p. Ibid., p. 11.)
88. Watson's way of drawing the weak-compulsive contrast fits nicely with the view of freedom of will recently offered in Gideon Yaffe, "Free Will and Agency at Its Best" in Philosophical Perspectives, 14: Action and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 203-29. There I suggest that freedom of will is a "thick" evaluative concept. That is, no analysis of the concept in purely descriptive terms will be satisfactory, but, instead, those to whom the concept applies must be thought of as exemplifying something that is intrinsically evaluative: agency at its best.
89. Gary Watson, "Excusing Addiction," LP 18 (1999): 605ff.
90. In developing his view there, Watson draws heavily on Dan Kahan and Martha Nussbaum, "Two Conceptions of Emotion in the Criminal Law," Columbia Law Review 96 (1996): 269-374.
91. Patricia Greenspan, "Behavior Control and Freedom of Action" in Moral Responsibility, John Fischer ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 191-204, argues that those who have motivations like the addict are unfree because of duress.
92. Kadri Vihvelin, "Stop Me Before I Kill Again," pp. 120-24, argues that whether or not duress of this sort undermines freedom, it does not undermine moral responsibility.
93. Notice that the robber, in this example, didn't literally choose to be threatened with a gun, and, conversely, the bystander very well may have voluntarily walked into the store at the wrong moment. So, what link between the duress-producing circumstances and the agent's voluntary conduct is needed to invalidate a duress defense is a complex matter.
94. Watson, "Excusing Addiction," p. 616;
95. "Disordered Appetites," p. 18.
96. R. Jay Wallace, "Addiction as Defect of Will," pp. 627-28, suggests that this sense in which the concept of compulsion is sensitive to normative assessments is of little significance. Wallace is certainly right that evaluative judgments of the sort that Watson appeals to are not sufficient for distinguishing compulsions from mere weaknesses. However, at issue for Watson at least, although not for Wallace, is not sufficiency, but necessity.
97. The definitive biography of Erdös is Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (New York: Hyperion, 1998).
98. This kind of line of thought is explored in an interesting and entertaining way in Thomas Schelling, "Rationally Coping with Lapses from Rationality" in GH, pp. 265-84.