Self-Deception and Responsibility for Addiction

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Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 20, No. 2, 2003

Self-Deception and Responsibility for Addiction

NEIL LEVY



We frequently accuse heavy drinkers and drug users of self-deception if they refuseto admit that they are addicted. However, given the ways in which we usually conceptualizeit, acknowledging addiction merely involves swapping one form of self-deception for another.We ask addicts to see themselves as in the grip of an irresistible desire, and to accept that addiction is an essentially physiological process. To the extent this is so, we, as much as theaddicts, suffer from self-deception, and the responsibility for their state is in part ours. Con-versely, since addicts are compelled to accept a self-deceptive image of themselves, they are at least partially excused from blame for their self-deception.

Addicts (among whom I include alcoholics) are stock characters in the literature onself-deception. The addicts who appear in this literature are self-deceived, in that theydeny they are addicts. They say that they can stop drinking any time they want, or thatthey do not drink any more than their friends, or that alcoholics are people who areunemployed, who live on the streets, who drink methylated spirits, not them. This kindof self-deceived addict is, I’m certain, real enough. But this is not the only kind of self-deceived addict. The addict is caught in a peculiar catch-22: victims of self-deceptionso long as they deny their addiction, they remain equally self-deceived when theyaccept the fact of their addiction.The fact that self-deceived addicts are caught in this bind makes assessing theirresponsibility for their addiction a complex affair. The second kind of addict, the onewho confesses her addiction, has her responsibility diminished, both for her self-deception and for the addiction it supports. Assessing the moral responsibility of self-deceivers is never easy, I claim; but when the self-deception is socially sanctioned, even

mandated

, like the self-deception in question, it serves as an almost total excuse.

New Conceptions of Self-Deception

Upon what I shall call the traditional conception of self-deception, assessing theresponsibility of its victims was relatively easy. Self-deception was characterized by twofeatures: (1) self-deceivers maintained contradictory beliefs concerning the subject of their self-deception, and (2) self-deception was intentionally entered into and main-tained. Because self-deceivers knew the truth whereof they deceived themselves, andbecause they deceived themselves deliberately and intentionally, they were held tobe responsible for their deception. Butler, who calls this state ‘internal hypocrisy’, isillustrative:

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Neil Levy

The temper itself is essentially in its own nature vicious and immoral. It isunfairness, it is dishonesty; it is falseness of heart [...] it is a corruption of the whole moral character in its principle [1].But we have good reason to reject both features of the traditional conception. Bothgive rise to paradoxes. Contradictory beliefs are mutually exclusive; if I believe that

,I am committed to believing that

∼∼

. I cannot, therefore, also believe that

∼

, on painof severe irrationality. It is, therefore, difﬁcult to see how I can simultaneously main-tain contradictory beliefs. It is also difﬁcult to see how I can intentionally deceivemyself, since I shall always see through my own stratagems. To be sure, we couldexplain both features of self-deception by postulating an unconscious, which, whileknowing that

∼

, might deceive my conscious mind into believing that

, but the costof so doing is high. To the extent I take this route, I risk losing the

self

from thepicture; if there are two agents at work, then perhaps we should talk about two selves.More relevantly for our purposes, to the extent we suppose that the unconscious is theagent of self-deception, we lose the right to attribute responsibility to the conscioussubject.In the face of these paradoxes, some philosophers have urged that we abandon thenotion of self-deception altogether. However, there is another route open to us: wecan follow philosophers like Alfred Mele in developing a ‘deflationary’ account of self-deception [2]. According to Mele, we need attribute to self-deceivers neither con-tradictory beliefs nor an intention to deceive. Instead, self-deception occurs wheneveragents treat evidence in a motivationally biased manner. Our motivation to believe aproposition frequently sets the stage for the activation of a number of well-attestedmechanisms identified by psychologists, such as the confirmation bias, in which peoplesearch for evidence in support of a hypothesis rather than evidence which woulddisconfirm it, and the availability heuristic, in which people are more impressed byevidence that is readily at hand. Thus we can be self-deceived without ever suspect-ing it.Mele, along with other philosophers who have developed similar accounts of non-intentional self-deception [3], nevertheless continues to maintain that self-deceivers aretypically responsible for their state. For them, it represents a culpable failure to controlour beliefs, or a failure of epistemic courage in the face of anxiety [4]. However, Isuspect that the presumption that self-deceivers are responsible for their deception isthe last remnant of the traditional conception. If we reject that conception, with itscontradictory belief and intentionality requirements, we should reject the presumptionof responsibility as well. For the self-deceiver to be responsible for her belief, she mustbe able to

identify

it as the result of a possibly biased belief formation process. Butneither Mele nor Barnes gives us good reason to believe that this will always, or evenusually, be the case. Once we reject the contradictory belief requirement, in particular,we have no reason to think that self-deceptive beliefs are phenomenologically unusualin any way, and, therefore, no reason to think that self-deceivers are aware

that

they areself-deceived, or that they possess any means to identify

which

of their beliefs aresuspect. Though self-deceivers will sometimes be responsible for their beliefs, we shouldabandon the presumption of culpability. Everything depends on the facts of the par-ticular case.

Self-Deception and Responsibility for Addiction

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Self-Deception and Addiction

Is the self-deceived addict responsible for her state? The ﬁrst step we would normallytake, in answering such a question, is that of deﬁning our key terms:

addict

and

responsibility

. ‘Responsibility’, of course, is a familiar concept in moral philosophy,upon which gallons of ink have been spilt. But ‘addiction’ is a colloquial term, withoutan agreed-upon use, either in philosophy, or in medicine [5]. More seriously, many of its deﬁnitions are, as it were, moralized: they have answers to at least some of thequestions concerning the responsibility of the addict already built in. For instance, if addiction is deﬁned as a

compulsive

state, such that addicts literally cannot resist theirurge to procure and take the drug of their choice, then it follows that they are notresponsible for doing so. On this view, an addict might be responsible for the initialactions which led to her coming to suffer this compulsion — she might be geneticallyresponsible for her addiction — but she is not responsible for maintaining it, nor forat least some of the actions she performs while in its grip.In order to avoid preempting the discussion which must take place before we assessthe responsibility of the addict, I shall therefore offer only a minimal definition of addiction, which refers only to brain-states and leaves its phenomenology and beha-vourial implications unexamined. I will say that an addict is someone whose brain hasundergone certain predictable changes as the result of the regular ingestion of a drug:they produce a lower than normal amount of a neurotransmitter called dopamine, orhave decreased sensitivity to dopamine, as a result of their brain’s adaptation to theincrease in dopamine production or sensitivity caused by the drug. Since dopamine isassociated with the ability to feel pleasure and pain, there are predictable phenomeno-logical effects of such a decrease or desensitization, including feelings of displeasure.But, as we shall see, the phenomenology of addiction is sensitive to belief, so I set asidethese effects here. This definition is intended only provisionally to fix the reference of our term. It does not include everyone we (perhaps correctly) call addicts, but deline-ates a group who can serve as paradigm cases.We can be clearer on the notion of responsibility intended here. We are not con-cerned with mere

causal

responsibility, but only with

moral

responsibility. Someone canbe causally responsible for an act (for instance) without being morally responsible forit: if, for instance, they have been coerced into it, or if they were (non-culpably)ignorant of what they were doing. Someone is morally responsible for an act, omissionor character trait if they are appropriate targets for the

reactive attitudes

with regard toit: if they can appropriately be blamed or praised for it [6]. In general, behaviour isreactive-attitude apt if it was intentional, if acceptable alternatives were available to theagent, and if the agent acted in the knowledge of the consequences of the act (or wasculpable for lacking such knowledge). This is far from a full definition of moral respons-ibility, but it will be sufficient for our purposes [7].Finally, we must be precise in delineating what the target of these reactive attitudes,when they are appropriate, is taken to be. Just what might addicts be held responsiblefor? As we have already seen, there are many possible such targets. Addicts might beresponsible for the origin of their addiction, for continuing to be addicted, for actionswhich are a consequence of the addiction, and for their beliefs regarding theiraddiction.Even this list might not be fine-grained enough: people often make further distinctions,