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ABSTRACT: Clinical criteria have trouble distinguishing addictions, on the one hand, from, on the other hand, appetites-like our appetites for food and water-and non-addictive passions that guide our lives, from serious hobbies to parenting. The simplest explanation of how addictions are distinct from non-addictive appetites and passions is that addictive behavior reveals some misvaluation by the addict, that the addict is wrong to act as she does. Psychological evidence supports this philosophical proposal by explaining how such a misvaluation is reinforced, namely by the addict's acting in unthinking, impulsive ways. This reinforcement explains addiction's chronic resistance to contrary evidence. This proposal neatly accounts for the questions left unanswered by standard diagnostic criteria of addiction.
KEYWORDS: addiction, compulsion, misvalue, diagnostic criteria, dependence, reinforcement, impulsivity, willing addict
The question 'What is addiction?' seems to ask for a clinical or biological answer. The research on addiction has progressed much faster in biology and neuroscience than our philosophical understanding of that research.1 Therefore, it can be tempting to look to the relevant psychology or neuroscience to answer our philosophical questions, which ends up treating addiction entirely as a psychological or neurological matter (Foddy and Savulescu 2010; Holton 2009, 97-111). However, many of our questions about addiction are not fundamentally biological or neurological questions. Here, I suggest that an answer to one question about addiction, the question of what addiction is, turns on the decidedly more philosophical question, "What is wrong with addiction?"
My argument focuses on a neglected distinction. Addictions look strikingly like normal appetites and strong passions that give our lives meaning. Yet our appetites and passions are not diseases, nor simple failures of rationality, nor should our passions be understood entirely as psychological or neurobiological matters.2 Because the commonly used diagnostic criteria of addiction cannot distinguish addictions from appetites and passions, I suggest that the clearest understanding of what addiction is, one that is consistent with ordinary usage and clinical criteria, comes from addiction's being similar to other behavior but distinct from it because we understand there to be something wrong with addiction that is not wrong with similar appetites and passions. Therefore, what is wrong with addiction partially explains what addiction is.
This project is one of rational reconstruction. Terms or concepts like 'addiction,'...