Table Of ContentAddiction and Self-Control
Oxford Series in Neuroscience, Law, and Philosophy
Series editors
Lynn Nadel, Frederick Schauer, and Walter P. Sinnott-Armstrong
Conscious Will and Responsibility
Edited by Walter P. Sinnott-Armstrong and Lynn Nadel
Memory and Law
Edited by Lynn Nadel and Walter P. Sinnott-Armstrong
Neuroscience and Legal Responsibility
Edited by Nicole A. Vincent
A Primer on Criminal Law and Neuroscience
Edited by Stephen J. Morse and Adina L. Roskies
The Future of Punishment
Edited by Thomas A. Nadelhoffer
Handbook on Psychopathy and Law
Edited by Kent A. Kiehl and Walter P. Sinnott-Armstrong
Bioprediction, Biomarkers, and Bad Behavior
Edited by Ilina Singh, Walter P. Sinnott-Armstrong, and Julian Savulecu
Addiction and Self-Control
Edited by Neil Levy
Addiction and Self-Control
Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology,
and Neuroscience
E B N L
DITED Y EIL EVY
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Addiction and self-control : perspectives from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience / edited by
Neil Levy.
pages cm. — (Oxford series in neuroscience, law, and philosophy)
ISBN 978–0–19–986258–0 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–19–931468–3 (updf) 1. Substance abuse—
Treatment. 2. Addicts. 3. Self-control. I. Levy, Neil, 1967– editor of compilation.
RC564.A558 2013
362.29—dc23
2012049466
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
CONTENTS
Contributors vii
1. Addiction and Self-Control: Perspectives from Philosophy,
Psychology, and Neuroscience 1
Neil Levy
2. Money as MacGuffi n: A Factor in Gambling and Other Process
Addictions 16
George Ainslie
3. Th e Picoeconomics of Gambling Addiction and Supporting Neural
Mechanisms 38
Don Ross
4. Team Reasoning, Framing, and Self-Control: An Aristotelian
Account 48
Natalie Gold
5. Phenomenal Authority: Th e Epistemic Authority of Alcoholics
Anonymous 67
Owen Flanagan
6. Varieties of Valuation in the Normal and Addicted Brain: Legal
and Policy Implications from a Neuroscience Perspective 94
Mark E. Walton and Nicholas A. Nasrallah
7. Are Addicts Responsible? 122
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
8. Just Say No? Addiction and the Elements of Self-Control 144
Jeanette Kennett
vi CONTENTS
9. Addiction in Context: Philosophical Lessons from a Personality
Disorder Clinic 165
Hanna Pickard and Steve Pearce
10. Are Addicts Akratic? Interpreting the Neuroscience of Reward 190
Gideon Yaff e
11. Addiction and Blameworthiness 214
Timothy Schroeder and Nomy Arpaly
12. Addiction Between Compulsion and Choice 239
Richard Holton and Kent Berridge
Index 269
CONTRIBUTORS
George Ainslie studies impulsiveness and self-control as intertemporal con-
fl ict within individuals (picoeconomics). He is the author of P icoeconomics: Th e
Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States within the Person and
Breakdown of Will , and he has published widely in psychological, eco-
nomic, philosophical, and legal literature. He is a research psychiatrist at the
Department of Veterans Aff airs Medical Center, Coatesville, PA, and professor
in the School of Economics, University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Nomy Arpaly is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. She
is the author of U nprincipled Virtue, Merit, Meaning and Human Bondage and
various articles.
Kent Berridge is the James Olds Collegiate Professor of Psychology and
Neuroscience at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA).
Owen Flanagan is James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Professor of
Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, Durham, NC. He is the
author of Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism and
Consciousness Reconsidered and other books.
Natalie Gold is a Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London, where she
leads the European Research Council–funded project “Self-Control and the
Person: An Inter-Disciplinary Account.”
Richard Holton is Professor of Philosophy at MIT. He currently works mainly
in action theory and moral psychology, and is the author of Willing, Wanting,
Waiting .
Jeanette Kennett is Professor of Moral Psychology in the Department of
Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She is lead investigator
on an Australian Research Council–funded project on Addiction and Moral
viii CONTRIBUTORS
Identity, which has supported work on her contribution to this volume. She has
published widely on moral agency and its impairments.
Neil Levy is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Florey Institute
of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Australia. He has published widely on the
topics of free will and moral responsibility, addiction, philosophical psychol-
ogy, applied ethics, and many other topics.
Nicholas A. Nasrallah completed his J.D. at Yale Law School and his doctorate
in psychology at the University of Washington. His research generally focuses
on the intersection between law and decision theory.
Steve Pearce is a consultant psychiatrist in Oxford, UK, where he runs the
Complex Needs Service, a specialist NHS service for people with personality
disorders and related conditions. He is the editor of the International Journal of
Th erapeutic Communities and president of the British and Irish Group for the
Study of Personality Disorder.
Hanna Pickard is a therapist at the Complex Needs Service, a specialist NHS
service for people with personality disorders and related conditions, and a
philosopher of mind and psychiatry. She holds a Wellcome Trust Biomedical
Ethics Clinical Research Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and
is a Fellow of All Souls College. Her research explores philosophical issues that
arise out of clinical practice and related science. Current projects include the
nature of responsibility and blame within the clinic and its potential use within
the criminal justice system and prisons, addiction, self-harm, violence, emo-
tions, and psychosis.
Don Ross is Professor of Economics and Dean of Commerce at the University
of Cape Town, and Program Director, Methodology, at the Center for Economic
Analysis of Risk at Georgia State University. His main current areas of research
are in economic methodology, the experimental estimation of utility function
distributions in heterogeneous populations, the picoeconomics and neuroeco-
nomics of impulsive choice, game-theoretic models of human sociality, and the
unifi cation of the sciences by reference to the statistical and stochastic character
of reality at all scales of modeling. He is the author or editor of 12 books and
numerous articles.
Timothy Schroeder is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio State
University. His Th ree Faces of Desire (Oxford University Press, 2004) presents
a theory of desire that lies at the intersection of moral psychology and the phi-
losophy of mind; he has also written on norms, concepts, consciousness, and
deliberation.
Contributors ix
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics
in the Philosophy Department and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke
University. He publishes widely in normative moral theory, meta-ethics, applied
ethics, moral psychology and neuroscience, philosophy of law, epistemology,
informal logic, and philosophy of religion.
Mark E. Walton is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow and University Research
Lecturer at the University of Oxford. His laboratory focuses on how diff erent
aspects of value are learned and represented by particular brain circuits and
how these are used to guide decision making.
Gideon Yaff e is Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Yale Law
School. He has published books and articles about agency and criminal respon-
sibility, including A ttempts (Oxford University Press, 2010) and "Lowering the
Bar for Addicts" (in Addiction and Responsibility , Poland and Graham, eds.,
2011).
