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Addiction, Compulsion, and Persistent Temptation

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Abstract

Addicts sometimes engage in such spectacularly self-destructive behavior that they seem to act under compulsion. I briefly review the claim that addiction is not compulsive at all. I then consider recent accounts of addiction by Holton and Schroeder, which characterize addiction in terms of abnormally strong motivations. However, this account can only explain the apparent compulsivity of addiction if we assume—contrary to what we know about addicts—that the desires are so strong as to be irresistible. I then consider accounts that invoke the phenomenon of “ego depletion,” according to which a person can resist temptation for a while, but not indefinitely. Implicit in this account is the assumption that addiction-related desires persist long enough to deplete the addict’s willpower. The balance of the paper argues that the persistence of the desire to consume drugs is a significant form of dysfunction in its own right, and that it makes an important and independent contribution to the compulsivity of addiction. I argue that addiction involves dysfunction in a mechanism that normally prevents a person from being tempted to do something that would invite disaster.

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Notes

  1. I prefer “proximal motivation” to “proximal desire,” since the former specifies that the state I have in mind motivates action. The term “desire,” (along with similar terms like “want”) may refer to either a motivation to act or to an agent’s pro-attitude toward a state of affairs. In some contexts—especially where the object of the mental state is a state of affairs rather than the taking of an action, or where less specificity is required—I will use the term “desire.” Thus, I call Smith’s attitude toward the state of affairs in which he sees into the gas tank a desire, but I call his being moved to strike the match a motivation. Thus, in speaking of “proximal motivation” rather than “proximal desire,” I do not mean to draw the distinction between desire and motivation that Schroeder draws.

  2. Of course, some people never form a proximal motivation to consume drugs, even in non-D-type situations. For some people, differences in physiology or experience may attenuate the extent to which a given drug really does improve their hedonic condition. Others are so put off by certain aspects of the use of some or all drugs for moral, religious, or aesthetic reasons that they do not regard them as ways to improve their hedonic condition. Others may believe that drug consumption is likely to have a net negative effect on their hedonic condition. Consequently, many people will not become motivated to consume drugs in response to a desire to improve their hedonic condition. Such people do not create the central puzzle addressed in this paper, namely, why some people do become proximally motivated to consume drugs in non-D-type situations, while others become proximally motivated to consume drugs even in D-type situations.

  3. Numerous findings about cognitive impairments associated with long-term drug use [27] suggest it can impair reasoning capacities involved in identifying danger, predicting consequences, judging likelihoods, and so on, which are central to being able to determine whether one is in D-type situation. Thus, addicts may be less likely than non-addicts to recognize D-type situations when they are in them.

  4. The role of judgment shifts in addiction and other irrational actions is emphasized by Holton [11] and Levy [28].

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to several anonymous reviewers and to an audience at the 2013 Northwest Philosophy Conference for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Religion, Central Michigan University, 288 Anspach Hall, Mount Pleasant, MI, 48859, USA

    Robert Noggle

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Noggle, R. Addiction, Compulsion, and Persistent Temptation. Neuroethics 9, 213–223 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-016-9279-2

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