Voluntary control of behavior and responsibility.

Hyman’s (2007) sensible, sophisticated, and balanced article makes the following important points about addictions. Whether addiction should be considered a disease, a moral failure, or sometimes both, is an open question. The primary criterion of addiction is behavioral, namely, compulsive drug seeking and using in the face of negative consequences. Even if addicts have difficulty controlling their behavior, they are not zombies or automatons, but instead act intentionally to satisfy their desire to find and use drugs. The neural mechanisms of addiction are still controversial but will surely be found. Environmental variables play an important role in explaining addictive behavior. Hyman (2007) offers his view of the most plausible candidate for an explanatory mechanism, which involves abnormal usurpation by drugs of the potent dopamine system that regulates reward. This usurpation makes drugs highly salient to the addict at the expense of other, more adaptive goals, creates craving if use is delayed, and thus undermines the addict’s ability to avoid seeking and using. Hyman concludes that recent neurobiological work suggests that “some apparently voluntary behaviors may not be as freely planned and executed as they first appeared” (2007, 8). This conclusion is the pay-off from neurobiology for understanding voluntary control of behavior. One implication, Hyman notes, is that addicts may not be as responsible for their conduct as some think (2007, 8). One consistent conceptual difficulty in this area is to define voluntary, a task Hyman (2007) undertakes only by implication. It is useful to distinguish literal involuntariness and metaphorical involuntariness. In cases of literally involuntary behavior, the body moves but it is not human action because it is not a result of the agent’s intentions. Reflexes and tremors are examples. Any bodily movement (or failure to move) that is a product of the agent’s intentions is an action, and involuntariness is only metaphorical. We may conclude that for various reasons we wish to characterize an action as involuntary, say, to avoid ascribing responsibility for it, but then we need to have criteria for metaphorical involuntariness.