Defining Addiction

Another drug-related death in the media, another chance for Peter Hitchens to tout his well-worn belief that addiction is not a thing.

Essentially his argument boils down to this:

P1: To be addicted to substance X means to be compelled to use substance X.

P2: If you are compelled to do something, you have no volition.

P3: So-called addicts have used their volition in order to combat addiction

C: By the principle of the excluded third middle, either addiction is falsely defined, or it does not exist: either addicts aren’t compelled to use substance X, in which case they aren’t addicted, or there is something faulty with the definition of addiction.

It’s certainly a valid argument and I’d contend it does indicate some fault with the way in which addiction is defined, at least here, for the purposes of Hitchens’ more fundamental contention: that we’re all ultimately free to do as we like, and those who ‘choose’ to destroy themselves by taking drugs are selfish and immoral. But this leads to a related and equally problematic logical conundrum, which is also the principal fulcrum on which this argument works: the embedded premise that human agents possess some inviolable faculty of volition, or ‘free will’. The problem I think Peter is having is that he is trying to assimilate an empirical concept to a metaphysical one.

What, I wonder, would Peter Hitchens’ definition of free will be? And does he think it is any less problematic than the definition of addiction? Has he entertained the idea doing the rounds among scientists and philosophers that ‘free will’ doesn’t exist?

There isn’t really a consensus as to a strict binary choice of whether free will exists or not, but something on which nearly all scientists and philosophers of mind agree is that if it does exist, it’s a very pallid, compromised thing compared to the quasi-Cartesian, metaphysical entity long held in the popular imagination. In other words, there’s very little doubt that our minds are identical with our brains, that the way we think and experience consciousness is as susceptible to factors in our external environment as the rest of our organism, and there’s very good reason to think this includes so-called ‘free will’.

That ‘free will’ isn’t a separate, non-physical thing was brought home to me the first time I was mugged. I had often imagined how I would behave in such a scenario; had mentally rehearsed a moralizing speech in which I appeal to the muggers’ better nature. In the reality of the moment, however, all I was aware of was a tightening of the throat, an inability to speak, my heart racing, weakness in my legs, and a literally overwhelming desire to run away, which I succumbed to. This wasn’t a case of me failing to marshal my will to deal with the situation, because obviously in such a description volition is present, when what’s really clear in retrospect was the nullification of my volition by the automatic flight-fight response of my body.

I’m not trying to settle this age old question with an anecdote, don’t worry. Nor am I equipped to properly enter into the complex debate as to the proper definition of ‘free will’ in the light of current scientific evidence. All I am trying to demonstrate in this post is that if there is a problem with the definition of ‘addiction’, then that is at least as much owing to a deep, long-standing issue with the definition and existential status of ‘free will’. None of us, I think, would find it plausible that we can renounce all claims to having control over our actions. But equally I don’t think anyone, except perhaps those who stubbornly cling to the scarcely tenable notion of an immaterial soul, would try to claim that they have absolute volition either.

Of course, ‘addiction’ must be a fallacy if we accept that ‘free will’ is a binary concept. Then it is something akin to Descartes’ cogito; a persistent, discrete entity that inhabits our organism like a ghost in a machine (to coin a phrase). Descartes’ argument for this was little more than that he could imagine it without any apparent contradictions; so Peter, I think, is imagining that ‘addiction’ must be fallacious because he can’t imagine the ‘addict’ ever losing his faculty to choose as to taking the putatively addictive substance: ergo, semper possum. And indeed, isn’t this borne out by evidence of recovering addicts finally exercising this faculty in deciding against taking the substance?

But as with Descartes’ cogito, there’s good reason to be dissatisfied with this conception. Rather than seeing ‘addiction’ as a phenomenon by which one’s volition is simply and categorically arrested, perhaps it’s better understood as that by which volition is seriously compromised and skewed. In other words, rather than conceiving the issue as a simple dichotomy between volition and addiction, it’s more accurate to imagine that each of us occupies a place on a spectrum, with a strong and extremely weak capacity for choice existing at either end respectively, and that the addict is located roughly at some point towards the latter.

What my anecdote above shows is that there are conditions under which making a choice is subjectively impossible; much to my surprise and shame, under conditions of immediate physical danger to my person, there simply didn’t exist in me the capacity to do anything other than run from the source of that danger. It may be hard to imagine that even under adverse conditions such as poverty, isolation, past emotional trauma, etc., choosing to not take substance X is subjectively impossible. Just as it had been difficult for me to imagine having no capacity for choice when threatened with immediate violence. There is something in the idea that we’re inherently disposed to resist: apart from anything else, we regard it as axiomatic that to be human is to weigh information in making rational, informed choices. That’s why it takes a radical change of context to appreciate the extent to which this volitional process, which we so take for granted as being fundamental to our nature, supervenes on circumstances that are disturbingly contingent.

Descartes imagined he could still think divorced from his physical body and concluded that thinking and physically existing are ontologically distinct; but at most his imagining entails something about the ways we can conceptualize the relations between mental phenomena, not about what they actually are. Descartes was, as famously argued by Gilbert Ryle, guilty of making a ‘category mistake’: failing to recognize that two distinct modes of presentation do not equate to two distinct ontological entities. Peter’s insistence on the mutual exclusivity of ‘being addicted’ and ‘possessing free will’ rests on a ‘category mistake’ as well; it’s supposing that ‘free will’ exists over and above our physical organism and the factors which impinge on it, rather than being a malleable and contingent property of that organism and those factors. Admittedly, the latter picture doesn’t easily accommodate a clean-cut definition of ‘addiction’ whereby we can identify the precise point at which one’s volition has been sufficiently negated to warrant the diagnosis; we can’t test for its absence in the way we can for other faculties, where we see in MRI and CT scans if the relevant part of the brain is active or not. But does this render the concept of ‘addiction’ useless? I don’t think so. The notion that people who are destroying themselves through persistent use of harmful substances aren’t in some way volitionally-impaired is too absurd.  The difficulty with the definition is simply reflective of the fact that very few aspects of our being lend themselves to clear-cut, abstract concepts; we’re actual inhabitants of an actual world, our relations to which are still exceedingly complex and mysterious. No doubt the definition needs to be carefully worded such that the likes of Peter’s argument don’t find such frustratingly easy purchase.