Feminist Philosophy Quarterly (May 2024)
Against Arguing about Addict Agency
Abstract
Much modern philosophy considers whether addicts—people who have normatively atypical relationships to various substances—possess genuine moral responsibility. Are addicts the subjects of apt attributions of blame, particularly in the context of their drug use and the negative consequences thereof? One group, “choice theorists,” tend to think so; another, “disease theorists,” think not. Rather than take a side or synthesize them somehow, I argue that we should stop arguing about this question entirely. In order for the discussion to be worthwhile, it must satisfy the basic condition of pragmatic bearing: some action, permissible to execute in reaction to addicts’ wrongdoing if they are morally responsible, but impermissible if they are not. I describe the set of arguably harmful actions often performed by addicts and enumerate the common penalties (which I collectively term “addict oppression” or, more neutrally, “addict sanctions”) imposed upon them by institutions in response. If the basic condition holds, those who view addicts as morally responsible and those who do not must disagree on the permissibility of at least some such sanctions, on responsibility grounds. But dispatches from the discourse demonstrate that choice and disease theorists generally agree on the appropriateness of the sanctions and on the (nonresponsibilist) nature of the justification. When dispute does arise, it doesn’t concern responsibility either. Neither the conclusion that addicts are morally responsible nor the conclusion that they aren’t licenses a meaningful change in the social treatment of addicts by nonaddicts and institutions. In particular, discussion of addict moral responsibility is irrelevant to the material conditions of addicts. Finally, I turn to an idiosyncratic attitude of indecision about addict responsibility, often detectable in the literature and in public life. I suggest that this indecision reflects the uneasy superimposition of two distinct possible addict futures—recovery and liberation—and hang my hat on liberation.
