Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 44, 2018

Philosophy of Action

Susanne Uusitalo
Pages 83-87

Addictive Action and Difficulty

Addiction is a phenomenon that usually offers challenges to theories of action. If we consider the standard causal theory of addiction, explaining addicts’ action in terms of their addictive desires leaves them without agency. If the compulsive desires bring about the action, despite the addicts’ views and attitudes toward their addiction, the desire just seems to force the addict to act accordingly. In light of philosophical studies (e.g. Watson 1999 and Levy 2006), this is not a plausible way of understanding addicts’ action, as they are agents in the sense that they are basically able to control their action and refrain from acting according to their addiction. Still it seems more difficult for addicts to act against the addictive desire. There has been empirical research that heroin addicts, for instance, have strong attentional bias to heroin-related cues and this feeds the strong desire they have for heroin (see Field and Cox 2008). In the presentation, I will consider two ways in which the addictive desire may be understood as a source of difficulty that the agent may experience in their action.