ABSTRACT
“Moral psychology” designates inquiry into the psychological infrastructure required for moral thought and practice. Historically, moral psychology has played a large role in moral philosophy, and many of the great works in the history of ethics—Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Hobbes’ Leviathan, and Hume’s Treatise, for example—open their accounts of ethics with extensive psychological theorizing. This makes sense, since ought plausibly implies can. So, a normative ethical theory should take into account fundamental empirical facts about what humans are capable of. A paradigmatic example is addiction, which has long raised questions about whether addicts’ motivations or capacity for self-control are affected in ways that should mitigate our normative assessments of their conduct. Historically, the relationship between moral judgment and addiction has not always been happy. For centuries, and even today in some quarters, addiction has been seen as a moral failing, rendering the addict culpable. It has taken years of empirical research to develop accounts of addiction that offer scientific alternatives to such moralization. However, medicalized approaches to addiction carry their own risks, since they threaten to remove choice or agency from addicts by positing “irresistible” desires driven by underlying physiological compulsions. What is needed is to understand the interaction of motivation and agency to see both how addicts can be exercising significant choice and how the mental and physical changes they undergo result in special and evidently difficult-to-manage problems for choice and action. Once we understand this interaction, we will be in a better position to pose normative and therapeutic questions about the extent or nature of an addict’s responsibility for her actions, and about what evaluative attitudes are appropriate for her, for those close to her, and for the wider society. If there is a moral problem with addiction, it seems unlikely to lie in addiction per se, but in the challenges addiction creates for personal choice, interpersonal relations, public health, and social policy.
