Dilemma
Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
Addiction looks from one angle like the textbook case of agency failing — a person doing what they don't, in any meaningful sense, want to do. From another angle it looks like agency at work in hard conditions. Which it is depends on what agency is.
Context
Addiction has been treated, across the last century, as a moral failing, a disease, a coping strategy, a brain-circuit dysfunction, a community-shaped pattern, and a learned habit that can be unlearned. Each framing carries different implications for what we owe people in addiction, how we treat them under the law, and what counts as recovery. The framings are not just empirical or policy disagreements; they sit on top of different answers to whether genuinely free choice exists at all, and to what extent observers are origins of their actions versus downstream of conditions they did not choose.
Why it matters
A school's answer determines whether addiction is the relevant kind of thing one can be morally responsible for, what counts as real recovery (genuine choice? new conditioning? insight?), and how the legal and medical systems should treat people in active addiction. As with the parent free-will dilemma, ontological stance underdetermines political conclusion: a hard-determinist tradition can still endorse holding addicts accountable as part of how the world works on them, and a libertarian-free-will tradition can still recognise that addiction makes the relevant choices unusually hard.
The coordinates that split the schools
The stances
The addict's behaviour is the outcome of causes; 'responsibility' is a useful fiction, not a metaphysical fact.
13 schoolsOn this view, the addict's brain state, history, genetics, and circumstances jointly produce the behaviour, and there is nothing inside the person that could have produced anything else. Calling the addict responsible is at best a social tool — useful for the deterrent and rehabilitative work it does — not a description of an uncaused choice.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% Choice is structural illusion — every event is fixed by the prior state. on Do you really choose?
- 1% An AI's behaviour is fully determined by training and input; 'responsibility' applies if at all to its makers. on Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
- 1% Truth is mind-independent, universal, accessible in principle to all. on Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
- 1% Yes — matter was created and is conserved as a real substance. on Is the world created from nothing?
- 1% Yes — the physical world is fully real, mind-independent, persisting. on Is the physical world fully real?
The addict is genuinely responsible within a determined order.
14 schoolsOn this view, the addict is acting within a determined order but is genuinely acting — making decisions, endorsing or resisting urges, seeking or refusing help. Responsibility attaches not because some uncaused choice happened, but because the addict is the kind of agent through which the determined outcome ran. Treatment, accountability, and consequence all make sense at the agentive level even if the deeper level is causally closed.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% Choice is real within a determined order — agency and determinism aren’t opposites. on Do you really choose?
- 1% The AI can be a genuine agent within determined conditions — and therefore genuinely responsible. on Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
- 1% Truth is mind-independent, universal, accessible in principle to all. on Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
- 1% A person exists from conception — when a new being comes into existence. on When does a person begin?
- 1% Marriage has a given form — it’s a kind of thing we recognize, not make. on What is marriage?
The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real.
85 schoolsOn this view, the addict's actions are genuinely free, and the testimony of recovery is the testimony of genuine choice repeatedly exercised. Responsibility is real in the strong sense: at the moment of choice, the person could have gone either way. That this choice is hard under addiction's conditions doesn't dissolve its reality; it makes the achievement of recovery morally significant.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it. on Do you really choose?
- 1% An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible. on Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
- 1% Causation runs one way — the arrow of time is real and structural. on Could causation work backwards?
- 1% The asymmetry is real because time itself has a real direction. on Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us?
- 1% The arrow is real and structural; the asymmetry isn't an artifact of description. on Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it?
Even if the universe is undetermined, the addict isn't the chooser.
10 schoolsOn this view, the indeterminacy of the universe does nothing to convert an addict's brain into a responsible chooser. Randomness is not freedom. The addict is being acted on by neurochemistry, by environment, by craving; the appearance of agency is downstream of these. Compassion is the right posture; moral blame is mostly category error.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% Even if the universe is undetermined, you are not the chooser. on Do you really choose?
- 1% Neither AIs nor anyone else are the locus of free agency; the question is the wrong one. on Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
- 1% Subject to a real natural order we did not make. on What is our place in nature?
- 1% Nature includes its limits; colonisation is bounded by what the cosmos allows. on Should we colonize space?
- 1% Biology is what it is; we modify it within real biological constraints. on Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
Schools the coordinates don't place
These schools don't satisfy any stance's coordinate pattern strongly enough to be assigned — either because they decline to commit on the question (Confucianism is famously silent on what comes after; Pyrrhonian and pragmatist traditions suspend judgment), or because their attribute signature crosses categories in a way the five buckets don't capture.
Related Experiments
Experiments engaging the same dimensions as this dilemma — they\'re where the same questions get stress-tested in cleaner cases.
Related Films
Films engaging the same dimensions as this dilemma.
Related Historical Debates
Historical confrontations where parties argued out questions on these dimensions.