Journal of Applied Philosophy,Vol. 27, No. 3, 2010 doi: 10.1111/j.1468-5930.2010.00493.

Addiction and Self-Deception: A Method for Self-Control?

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MARY JEAN WALKER

abstract Neil Levy argues that while addicts who believe they are not addicts are selfdeceived, addicts who believe they are addicts are just as self-deceived. Such persons accept a false belief that their addictive behaviour involves a loss of control. This paper examines two implications of Levys discussion: that accurate self-knowledge may be particularly difcult for addicts; and that an addicts self-deceived belief that they cannot control themselves may aid their attempts at self-control. I argue that the self-deceived beliefs of addicts in denial and of self-described addicts differ in kind. Unlike the self-deception of an addict in denial, that of the self-described addict allows them to acknowledge their behaviour. As such, it may aid an addict to develop more self-control. A paradoxical implication is that this self-deception may allow an addict more self-knowledge.

Addiction may be considered an example of a quite thoroughgoing failure of self-control. Persons with addictions are sometimes aware that their addictive behaviour should be altered, and yet they have great trouble bringing such change about. Explaining why this is so, however, is not easy. Among the various explanations offered are the disease conception of addiction, where the behaviour is medicalised; the notion that such people are the victims of irresistible desires or overwhelming compulsions; that they have disordered desires, weighing the benets and costs of the addictive behaviour differently to others; or that they tend to discount future costs at a greater rate than other people.1 These are ways of explaining why such people fail to control their own behaviour. A complicating factor is that what it means to say that someone is an addict is unclear. Many of the denitions available have problematic implications regarding an addicts ownership of the addictive behaviour, to what extent they are able to control it, and whether they are to be considered responsible for it. One well known feature of addiction is that addicted people often do not recognise their own addiction, or they fail to recognise some features of it, such as that it is causing problems for them or for those around them. We can consider such denial to be a species of self-deception, insofar as the person ignores evidence that their behaviour is addictive or problematic. Denial is a common state for an addicted person, and it plays a role in allowing them to maintain the addiction. It represents a failure of selfknowledge which impacts on the continuation of the problematic behaviour. Neil Levy has argued that self-deception is a common feature not just of active addicts, but also of recovered or recovering addicts.2 While an addict who denies their addiction is as such self-deceived, the addict who admits it is self-deceived in this belief. Such an addict will merely have substituted one set of self-deceptions for another.3 The belief that one is an addict is self-deceptive, Levy argues, because our cultures concept of addiction includes falsities. It implies that the addictive motives and behaviour are
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outside of the addicts will or self, that they are not the addicts own.4 This conception of addiction is common is popular culture, and Levy considers twelve-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous to encourage addicts to accept it. AA and its sister programs tell addicts that they are powerless over their addiction, and that they must admit that they are addicts in order to change their behaviour. As such, applying the concept to themselves leads addicts to have false beliefs. An addict is therefore, as Levy puts it, caught in a peculiar catch-22: victims of self-deception so long as they deny their addiction, they remain equally self-deceived when they accept the fact of their addiction.5 This intriguing argument suggests two lines of inquiry, beyond the use to which Levy puts it, which I will examine here.6 First, it implies that there is something about the behaviours conceptualised as addictions that makes accurate self-knowledge particularly difcult. Self-knowledge is indeed difcult for us all but perhaps even more so for an addict. Levy attributes this difculty to the way that addiction is currently understood in our culture. There may be some truth in this, but I will argue that the sort of behaviour that addictions involve also tends to encourage a particular kind of failure of selfknowledge, which occurs when a person cannot understand why they act as they do; when they do not know their own reasons for action. Second, Levys argument suggests that to the extent that recovery programs are successful, the self-deceptive belief involved in a person taking themselves to be an addict is a potentially benecial one. It plays a role in allowing the person to attain more self-control, and to change their behaviour. Indeed this is the reason such programs encourage addicts to admit their addiction. The idea that some self-deceptions may be useful has been noted by a number of philosophers and psychologists,7 although it is not clear how to tell useful from harmful deceptions. In what follows I will distinguish self-deceptions on the basis of what sort of self-knowledge they preclude, which may point to potential approaches to answering this question. While I will agree with Levy that self-described addicts are self-deceived, I will argue that the self-deception of the addict in denial contributes to failures of self-control, while that of the self-described addict can support their attempts at self-control. My method will be to examine autobiographical reports, and the literature of AA, all by persons who call themselves addicts. This is a vastly underused resource by theorists attempting to understand addiction, but one that may be valuable in overcoming problems in the way addiction is currently conceptualised.8 While there are reasons to be cautious in drawing on this material, a subsidiary motivation of this paper is to show that there is much to be learned from assuming that addicts have something relevant to tell us about their behaviour.9 In Section 1, I draw on a distinction developed by J. David Velleman between kinds of self-knowledge, and argue that we can consider some failures of self-control to block one of these kinds of self-knowledge. Section 2 examines addicts own accounts of their experience, to show that their experience of failing at self-control does lead them to lack self-understanding. I explain how their experiences of struggling to control themselves may lead them to conclude that they are unable to control themselves or change their behaviour, in Section 3. Section 4 discusses the conceptions of addiction that have centred on the notion of the loss of control, and argues that addicts who accept them thereby accept false beliefs but that those false beliefs do resonate with their experience. Section 5 will clarify the sense in which this is self-deception, and how the false
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beliefs may simultaneously fail to resonate with an addicts experience. However, these false beliefs also remove the motive for the self-deception of denial. In Section 6, I discuss the differences between these kinds of self-deception, and their opposite effects on a persons attempts at self-control. This will show, paradoxically, that the selfdescribed addicts self-deception is used to overcome a gap in the addicts selfknowledge. If the self-deception succeeds in lling that gap, it may become an aid to self-knowledge, as well as to self-control. 1. Addiction, Self-Deception, and Self-Knowledge Before proceeding, some denitions are in order. One reason discussions of addiction are so puzzling is that there is no satisfactory denition of addiction. The sorts of addictions that concern me here involve the addicted person repeatedly indulging in some specic behaviour, despite that behaviours having a negative impact on their health and/or wellbeing, and the wellbeing of those around them.There are of course some addictions, such as to coffee, which are not of this kind, and those do not concern me here. The behaviour with which I am concerned is the kind that may lead someone into treatment, or a recovery program.Whatever the true explanation of such behaviour is, it is puzzling because the person appears to have very good reasons to cease it, sometimes admit and sincerely believe they have such reasons, and yet they continue the behaviour. These addictions thus involve a failure of self-control. Addicted persons do not, for whatever reason, control their addictive behaviour in the way that non-addicted people do, sometimes despite deliberate attempts to do so. I shall understand self-control as having ones actions match ones prior intentions. Someone who shows self-control forms intentions, and then acts in line with them. Addicts who form intentions to alter their addictive behaviour and then fail to do so thus lack self-control. The self-deception of denial plays a role in this failure of self-control. Addicts may tell themselves they are not addicted and could stop if they so chose; fail to acknowledge that they drink, use, gamble, and so on more than others; or think in spite of the evidence that their behaviour is not causing problems. In the terms developed by Fingarette, addicts disavow some aspects of their engagement with the world, either by failing to acknowledge it, or failing to acknowledge that it is their own.10 Self-deception has traditionally been understood by philosophers to involve holding contradictory beliefs: accepting both p and not p. In order to make sense of this, the sense in which p and not p are accepted may be thought to differ. Perhaps p is consciously believed while not p is believed subconsciously, for instance, or there is some other inner division, so that one part of the self can be considered to deceive the other.11 But explanations that split the self in such a way may be dissatisfying, and so some philosophers have abandoned the idea that self-deception must involve accepting contradictory beliefs. Instead, self-deception could involve holding p despite there being good evidence available to the person that not p. The crucial point here is that self-deception must involve some tension within the persons beliefs or epistemic outlook.12 This tension arises from the persons repressing some evidence, diverting their attention from it, or selectively weighing evidence. This description most closely captures the self-deception of an addict in denial: they believe they are not addicted, despite there being good evidence available to them that they are. Such evidence is ignored, or rationalised away, and attributed to other causes.
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Another crucial feature of self-deception is that the false belief is a motivated belief. In the case of addiction, the motivation for denial can be explained as arising from the pain of such an admission, the guilt the person might feel about their behaviour should they acknowledge it and perhaps, that such an admission might obligate them to change their behaviour.13 Fingarette argues that an (active) addicts motivation for selfdeception is to escape the internal conict that arises as a result of the difference between what they do, and what they think they should do: acknowledging their addiction would mean acknowledging that they are not acting as they should. The person disavows the behaviour to avoid the guilt of such a recognition. This explains for Fingarette why moralising at an addict will usually not have an effect: it simply increases their guilt, and so bolsters the self-deception that this guilt motivates.14 The self-deception thus acts to block self-knowledge that the person would nd aversive. However, the person is thereby prevented from benetting from such selfknowledge. In refusing to acknowledge their behaviour or its consequences, they also block the formation of reasons to alter that behaviour, or knowledge that could help them to do so. As in many other cases, the lack of self-knowledge involved is harmful. In order to more fully understand what sort of self-knowledge may be blocked by the self-deceptions surrounding addiction, I shall draw on a distinction between kinds of self-knowledge developed by Velleman. Self-knowledge has been considered a special kind of knowledge by many philosophers, from Socrates onwards. It differs from knowledge of other objects, because the subject who knows coincides with the object that is known. As well as altering the signicance of the knowledge quite dramatically, this feature of self-knowledge alters how we may know ourselves. Velleman argues that as self-conscious beings with a rst-personal perspective, we are able to conceptualise ourselves as objects within the world, distinct from other objects.15 This capacity means that we can think of ourselves as if from a third-personal perspective, as creatures in the world. This in turn allows us to observe our behaviour, and question ourselves about it. The structure of reective consciousness may thus give rise to a reective gap, between oneself as the object observed and oneself as the observer. One effect of this capacity for reective self-consciousness is that we can become puzzled by our own behaviour. I can observe what I am doing, and question my reasons. Most of the time, I will have some answer to give myself about why I am doing what I am doing. My answer will explain my reasons for action, giving considerations in light of which the behaviour makes sense to me. For example, if I pause in writing this paper and ask myself why I am doing so, I could answer myself in terms of wishing to explain or assess my thoughts, and so on. I can point to various features of myself, or to my intentions, which explain this behaviour. This would be one way to gain self-knowledge: to observe my own behaviour, and then retrospectively assess what caused it. In some cases such an assessment might spring from genuine puzzlement: nding myself unexpectedly behaving angrily, I might think back, seeking an explanation. If I nd some satisfactory explanation, I increase my self-knowledge. As in most other kinds of knowing, I would adjust my beliefs about the observed object (myself) to t the observed facts about it. But because the knower coincides with what is known in self-knowledge, there is another route to self-knowledge. I have some control over what I do, and can make decisions and form intentions about my behaviour. Thus, rather than changing my beliefs about myself to t the observed facts, I can also try to alter how I behave, so that
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the facts will t my beliefs.That is, in order to understand my behaviour, I can simply act in line with my antecedent reasons for action. One way to understand myself is thus to act on my intentions. Since my intentions are already based on my accepted reasons for action, they provide an inbuilt explanation of that behaviour and so, a kind of shortcut to self-knowledge.16 Self-knowledge can thus be gained through two different routes: we can observe our behaviour and then look for an explanation; or we can simply act on our own intentions. This implies that failures of self-knowledge can also be of two different kinds. First, I might nd myself acting in ways which I cannot explain. If I nd myself behaving angrily, as in the above example, but can nd no reason for such behaviour, this would be puzzling, and I might stop and wonder about it until an explanation was found. Second, though, I could fail to achieve self-knowledge by failing to act on my own intentions: by failing at self-control. If I intend one action but nd myself doing another, this too would cause a failure of self-knowledge; a failure to take advantage of the shortcut to selfknowledge that was open to me had I acted on my intention. I would be left with only the rst option, of trying to retrospectively uncover my reasons for action. Velleman considers the puzzlement that can arise from not being able to understand ourselves to be aversive.17 We have an intellectual drive towards self-knowledge. When this drive is frustrated, and we cannot understand what we do, the experience is discomting. Of course, in many situations in which a person does not act as they intended, an explanation can be found. It may be that the person changed their intention at a later moment, for instance. The discomfort of not knowing why they have so acted would dissipate if some explanation for the failure to act on the original intention were discovered. But there may also be cases where no explanation can be found, and a person is unable to explain their failure at self-control. This situation is itself aversive. I shall argue that addictive behaviour involves people in both kinds of failure of self-knowledge: addicts fail to act on their intentions, and cannot understand why this occurs. 2. Addiction and Self-Control There are presumably many addicted people who do not have any intention to alter their behaviour. However, some addicts do report that they found their behaviour problematic, and wished to change it. Some do form intentions and plans to change their patterns of use, or abstain altogether. But such people nd themselves continually failing to carry out these intentions. For whatever reason, the attempt is difcult for them. The autobiographical accounts of alcoholism offered in Alcoholics Anonymous provide numerous examples of this feature of addiction. Here are just a few: I tried so many ways of beating the game: I went to church and took a pledge; I went to a Native sweat lodge; I would do something so I would be put in jail; I vowed to stay away from hard liquor. Nothing worked.18 I began to try to get sober. Sometimes I would last for a week or two. Then I would get drunk again.19 I tried everything. I moved a thousand miles away from home to Chicago and a new environment. I studied art; I desperately endeavoured to create an
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Mary Jean Walker interest in many things, in a new place among new people. Nothing worked. My drinking habits increased despite my struggle for control. I tried the beer diet, the wine diet, timing, measuring, and spacing of drinks. I tried them mixed, unmixed, drinking only when happy, only when depressed. And still . . . I couldnt stop drinking.20 There was no escape route I had not tried, none that had not led to another failure.21

Addicts who attempt self-control may nd that their plans to change their behaviour are ineffectual: they repeatedly fail to have their actions match their intentions. Such addicts thus fail to make use of the shortcut to self-knowledge that Velleman describes.Whatever the real cause of this failure is, it precludes the addicts being able to understand their actions through acting on their intentions. They will need to nd some retrospective explanation for this behaviour. There is also evidence in these autobiographical accounts that such failures are in fact experienced by addicts as both aversive and puzzling. As well as communicating a sense of hopelessness and despair, these accounts frequently report bafement about their own actions or sometimes, about their own self: . . . for the life of me I did not know how or why this had happened to me . . . People didnt behave this way outside of an asylum.22 I was utterly bewildered at where life had taken me.23 I went to places I used to swear I would never go. I did things I could not imagine myself doing. I hung out with people that at one time I would cross the street to avoid. There came a time when, looking into the mirror, I honestly did not know just who was looking back at me.24 I was loud and arrogant, angry, abusive, always blaming and confronting others. I was getting arrested and beaten up . . . my teaching career ended in total dishonor. My family could not understand what was happening to me, nor could I.25 . . . my actions drunk or sober, before A.A., were not those of a sane person.26 In these cases, the repeated failures of self-control do result in a lack of selfunderstanding.These quotations also show some attempts to nd an explanation for this behaviour, in the idea that perhaps they were insane. At some points these peoples lives, they may have offered various rationalisations for their behaviour, explaining to themselves that they had altered their previous intention not to partake for some understandable reason. But the repeated failures may cause these people to reach a point where they have run out of such rationalisations, and can nd no reason for their own behaviour. The consistent failure to have ones actions match what was intended therefore results in a failure of self-knowledge, in the sense of a gap between a persons accepted reasons to act, and their actual behaviour. As Velleman argues, such a gap can be discomting.
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With at least some cases of addiction, this is very likely an understatement: when a persons own actions lead them to alienate their friends, to lose care of their children, ruin previously cherished careers, and other dramatically negative consequences, the gap could become traumatic. An addict could potentially respond to their lack of self-knowledge and aversive state of puzzlement in a number of ways. First, the addict could become motivated not to acknowledge that behaviour or its negative impact, and so it could motivate the selfdeception of denial, as discussed above. The addict could seek some or other rationalisation for the behaviour, or nd ways of disavowing the emerging pattern. Second, though, some addicts appear to respond to their repeated failures of self-control by coming to the conclusion that they cannot stop: that the desires they have are stronger than their own will, or that there is nothing they can do about their own behaviour. That is, it may lead them to consider themselves to be addicts, who are unable to control themselves. 3. Loss of Control So far, we have seen that addicts who do not acknowledge their addictions are selfdeceived, and that the motive for this self-deception arises from negative feelings or consequences associated with such acknowledgement. I have argued that if the addict begins to acknowledge the need to change their behaviour, they may experience a different kind of failure of self-knowledge, which occurs because they often fail in their attempts at self-control, and continue to act in ways they cannot explain. If a person were to remain in this state of acknowledging that their behaviour should be changed, and being puzzled about failing to do so this would constitute a failure of self-knowledge, but not of false belief. A false belief often does arise from this experience, however. The autobiographical accounts in Alcoholics Anonymous reveal that such experience does lead some to conclude that they cannot stop: Id known for a long time that I desperately wanted off this merry-go-round, but I had no idea how to do it. . . . It didnt matter what the consequences were I couldnt not drink, and I gave up trying.27 I had been sincere in all my promises to [my wife] . . . but the urge to take that drink was more powerful than anything else.28 The only reality I was able to face had been forced upon me by its very repetition I had to drink.29 An addicts belief that they cannot stop, lose control, or are powerless, is thus a result of their repeated experience of failing at self-control. It is an attempt to express their repeated experiences of failing to match their actions to their intentions. Of course, there are other ways of explaining such an experience than attributing it to loss of control, such as time-discounting, having skewed desires, and so on. My point here is just that for the person struggling to alter such behaviour patterns whatever the true explanation of this struggle it may be experienced as an inability to stop.Whether or not this is the real cause or true explanation for their behaviour, it expresses this feature of their experience.
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Addicts are not the only people who can come to learn from the repeated failure of plans that their plans must fail. Calhoun argues that when a persons plans repeatedly fail to affect outcomes, they may become demoralized.30 Demoralisation is an attitude a person forms towards their own practical reasoning, when they believe it will not be efcacious. Calhoun draws on empirical research on learned helplessness.31 In experiments by Seligman, subjects quickly learned under manipulation from experimenters that their plans, which in the experiment were to avoid small electric shocks, were not having the intended outcomes. On learning they were helpless they ceased to make any attempt to avoid the electric shocks, even when they were avoidable. If a person learns that their plans have no real chance of affecting the world in the ways they intend, they may lose condence that their plans will be efcacious, and so stop making plans. Calhoun argues that demoralisation disrupts necessary background frames for successful agency. The cases she has in mind as demoralising are quite different to the case of addiction: she discusses abuse, cultural dislocation, poverty, and trauma. A woman in an abusive relationship might nd that her intentions and plans are continually undermined at the whims of her abusive partner. A refugee may nd that their plans of action in their new country continually fail, because they do not sufciently understand the culture in which they are acting to plan effectively within it. In these situations, the outcomes are not what the person intends because their plans are disrupted by features of the situation they are in.32 With regard to addiction, it seems the person undermines their own plans, in some sense or other. Nonetheless, as the autobiographical accounts show, they may come to learn that their plans to change their addictive behaviour will not succeed, and become demoralised. With regard to addiction, demoralisation can result in an addict believing that since none of their intentions not to partake have the intended effect, they may as well not try. Thus the difculty of changing addictive behaviour can result in beliefs about the behaviour that actually reinforce that difculty. As one AA member says in explaining their continued use, I heeded that voice that said, You may as well drink. You know youre going to .33 The repeated failures at self-control become self-reinforcing, as the person comes to believe that their attempts to change behaviour will fail; learning that their actions will not in the end match their intentions, they cease to form those intentions. To do so would be pointless, because they cannot stop. The idea that addiction means being unable to stop does, in this sense, resonate with an addicts experience. I will argue below that it is not true that addicts cannot control themselves, although it is clear that doing so is difcult. There are other explanations for this difculty that may be closer to the truth: perhaps an addict would more accurately describe their behaviour if they were to say I repeatedly fell into imprudent timediscounting, or I had skewed reasons to act. But understanding how the repeated experience of failing to have their actions match their intentions results in a lack of self-knowledge, puzzlement about their behaviour, and demoralisation, helps to explain why it may seem to an addict that they are powerless over their addiction.

4. Conceptions of Addiction There are good reasons to think that addiction should not be understood to involve a complete loss of control. Loss of control is the central feature of a number of prob Society for Applied Philosophy, 2010

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lematic conceptions of addiction. In general, such conceptions understand this loss of control to mean that the addictive motives and behaviours are outside of the addicts will or self. The addict is considered to react to compulsive urges, over which they have no control. Such an idea of what it means to be an addict is why self-described addicts are self-deceived, in Levys view.34 He considers this conception to be common in popular culture, AA and other recovery and treatment programs, and the moral psychology literature. It is also the central feature of the now discredited disease concept of addiction. Levy objects to these conceptions of addiction on two grounds. First, it is simply not true that an addict is compelled by forces outside their will: addicts do have a choice.35 There are many good reasons to accept this. Numerous empirical studies have shown that addicts can and do choose not to partake if they perceive the costs and benets associated with doing so to make it worthwhile.This has been conrmed in experimental conditions and is borne out by observations of addictive behaviour under usual conditions.36 And, of course, many people considered addicts do succeed in changing their addictive behaviour, either for long periods of time or forever. Addicts thus are not unable to control themselves. The second problem with this conception of addiction is its implication that an addict is not responsible for their behaviour. This implication also seems false, and may have pernicious effects for the addict. It can provide an excuse for the behaviour or for relapse, encouraging addicts not to attempt to control their behaviour, as we saw above. This conception of addiction may also prevent the addict, as Levy says, from focusing on the role excessive consumption plays in her life, the function it serves for her, and therefore prevents her from addressing the real source of her problems.37 While conceptions of addiction that centre on loss of control attempt to capture something true of addiction that it is very resistant to efforts at self-control they go too far in saying that addicts have no choice, and placing the addictive desires outside the addicts will. Perhaps the best-known variant of this view is the disease conception of addiction, which medicalises the behaviour and views it as the effects of an illness. Of course there is some truth in this basic idea, as neurological studies of the effects of substance abuse have shown. But this cannot be taken to imply that an addict suffers from a complete loss of control. Levy assumes that such a conception of addiction is accepted by AA and other recovery programs, and addicts who are members of them.This is certainly true of some proportion of AAs members.38 However, the conception of addiction offered in these programs is more complex than Levy (and many theorists) assume.39 Their literature reveals ambivalence towards questions of an addicts ownership and responsibility. Examining the apparently paradoxical statements in this literature reveals why thinking of themselves as having no control over their addiction may both resonate with their experience to an extent, and may aid addicts to overcome the failures of self-knowledge described above. On one side of the paradox, Alcoholics Anonymous tells us that alcoholics . . . are in the grip of a progressive illness, that alcoholics have no willpower, and that they have lost the power of choice.40 It includes a section titled The Doctors Opinion, outlining the disease concept of alcoholism. On the other side, the literature describes alcoholism is an illness with physical, mental and spiritual dimensions41, and describes a recovery process that includes moral and psychological components.42 They prescribe
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self-analysis, taking responsibility, and examining the role that their addiction did play in their lives, for recovering addicts. One way in which the resulting ambivalence is manifested is reported by Larkin and Grifths, who found that recovering addicts often spoke of themselves as being two different agents: the addictive self or inner addict, and the real self discovered in abstinence.43 Wrong motives or behaviours would be attributed to the inner addict, and dissociated from the real self.This allowed the addicts in this study to see their addictive motives and behaviour as part of their self, but not part of their real self.This manoeuvre is a reection of the paradoxical beliefs outlined above: addictive motives and behaviours are neither completely their own, nor entirely a result of an outside compulsion. Although Levy oversimplies the conception of addiction offered to addicts in these programs, the central feature of their conception of addiction is still that the addict cannot control their addictive motives or behaviour whether those motives arise from their inner addict, or from an outside compulsion. This conception of addiction thus does tell an addict that the addictive motives and behaviours, in some sense or other, did not originate in the addict or not in their real self. This feature of these conceptions of addiction allows us to identify another sense in which such conceptions do resonate with the experience of addicts. Autobiographical reports indicate that a loss of control explanation is sometimes accepted by addicts because it provides a way to overcome the puzzlement resulting from the lack of self-understanding. For example: I stayed up all night reading that book [Alcoholics Anonymous]. For me it was a wonderful experience. It explained so much I had not understood about myself . . .44 Oh yes, now, it all falls into place. . . . Now I know that there are people out there like me, with my thoughts, my behaviour, my [er] way of life . . . my brother was an asthmatic and I used to wish I had something tangible like that. I needed to put myself in a box Im this: I never really knew what I was, apart from somebody who got very down, very depressed most of the time, and generally someone who, you know, had very big problems around just relationships with people.45 This indicates that some addicts may be motivated to accept the conception of addiction offered to them just because it provides some explanation. If they lack understanding of what they are doing, and such a state is aversive, having some explanation will be preferable to having no explanation. If this is right, then any explanation would be as good as any other. But explanations that centre on the notion of a loss of control also provide an explanation for the addicts state of puzzlement itself. In implying that the motives and behaviour did not originate with them or with their real self the notion of a loss of control can explain to the addict why they continually acted in ways they could not understand, by acting against their intentions. Such conceptions of addiction may thus capture what the experience of addiction can feel like to addicts, in two senses. They explain the behaviour itself, and they explain the addicts lack of self-understanding with regard to their addictive behaviour. Nonetheless, the reasons for viewing the notion of loss of control as false still stand. As well as research indicating that such a loss of control is not the crucial feature of
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addictive behaviour, and the other reasons which Levy gives, the belief of loss of control is itself used to develop control over their behaviour. Behind the paradoxical statements of addicts in these programs, there lurks a central paradox: these addicts believe they suffer from a loss of control and this belief is taken on as a reason to control themselves.46 5. Addiction and Self-Deception Self-described addicts thus do accept a false belief. But why think this is self-deception? After all, my aim above was to show that accepting such an idea does resonate with addicts experience, which might indicate that while the belief that they suffer from a loss of control is false, it is not self-deceptive.The reason we may consider this self-deception is that there are other senses in which the conception of addiction as a loss of control does not resonate with their experience, and causes tensions within their beliefs. There is a variety of evidence available to a self-described addict that the belief that they are incapable of control is false. Primarily, any addict who uses these recovery programs successfully has reason to believe that they can change their behaviour. Further, some addicts also have controlled lapses, where they indulge the relevant desires without losing control, or can remember that they have done so in the past. Autobiographical accounts also reveal addicts doubts: When I rst went to AA, they told me Id been ill that I had an illness, a disease, a kind of allergy that once activated, resulted in me not being able to stop drinking . . . There was a part of my brain that didnt fully accept that explanation.47 . . . I still have trouble connecting [my experience] to the concept of permanent, progressive illness. What about the times I drank and didnt lose control?48 Fingarette notes that such a mist between the explanation offered to addicts of their own behaviour and their actual experience may not be uncommon. The intensive self-analysis a person undertakes in these programs could actually constitute a reinterpretation of that experience. Perhaps reinterpretation occurs such that any sense in which their behaviour seemed to them at the time to be chosen, or their desires to stem from their self, are negated.49 Self-deception is further indicated by the fact that there are many motivations for an addict to accept a conception of addiction that centres on the loss of control, apart from its seeming to explain their experience. First, a persons drive towards self-knowledge means that having some explanation is better than having none, as reported by addicts and described above. An addict may simply accept this explanation for their behaviour in the absence of any other. Second, as Levy argues, a person might accept this explanation out of fear that denying that they are an addict will lead them to continue their addictive behaviour: the fear of being self-deceived by denial could lead them to accept an alternate explanation that is offered.50 But third, the explanation given is one that is felt as a relief, in the sense that it simultaneously removes some of the guilt and pain involved in seeing their own behaviour clearly.51 What this means is that the self-deception of the self-described addict functions to remove the motive for the self-deception of the addict in denial. A conception of
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addiction which tells an addict their behaviour was not under their control undermines the motivation for the self-deception involved in denial, so that accepting it may allow addicts to see their own previous behaviour more clearly. An addict accepting the false explanation may thus come to avow an engagement with the world that they had been previously motivated to disavow.

6. Self-Deception and Self-Control The self-deception that is involved when addicts take themselves not to have control over their actions in a particular domain can, in light of this discussion, be considered a different kind of self-deception to that of the addict in denial. The addict in denial is self-deceived in not acknowledging their behaviour, its consequences, or that the consequences are negative. They disavow this aspect of themselves, divert their attention from it, and perhaps, tell themselves comforting lies of rationalisation.They fail to notice or acknowledge what those around them can quite often plainly see, and fail to understand the truth about their own motives and behaviour. The self-described addict, in contrast, learns to acknowledge exactly these features of their lives. They do so through accepting a false explanation of those motives and behaviours.They accept a false explanation of why their actions did not match their own intentions but this allows them to view those intentions and actions themselves, with less bias. Thus while Levy is correct in saying that self-described addicts are deceiving themselves if they believe they have no control, the self-deception is of a signicantly different kind to addicts in denial. The difference in kind of these self-deceptions is signicant in two important respects. First, the self-deception of the self-described addict is aimed at, and sometimes succeeds in, allowing a person to attain more self-control. Since it provides an addict with an explanation for their previous failures at self-control, it can help to overcome demoralisation. Accepting the problematic conception of addiction means that the addicts previous failures at self-control can be attributed to their addictive self, and so provides an explanation for those failures. At the same time, these failures can be distanced from the real self, so an addict no longer needs to consider themselves as someone whose plans will not affect outcomes.While that may have been true of the addictive self, it need not be true of the real self. While the self-knowledge thus achieved is not entirely accurate, it means the addict, in having some explanation of their behaviour, can come to see their own plans as potentially efcacious once more. As such, it can encourage an addict to reconnect their actions to their intentions, making them more likely to form intentions to alter their behaviour. This is consistent with the statements of addicts and the addiction literature that the admission of being an addict is used as reason for change. This kind of self-deception thus differs from the kind they began with, in that it may encourage rather than prevent further attempts at self-control: it may support agency rather than undermining it. The second difference in this kind of self-deception is that, ironically, it allows a person to achieve more self-knowledge. Since it removes the motive to disavow their addictive desires and behaviour, the addict may become more likely to see their behaviour clearly even if they then attribute it to some other self. Since the self-deception can help the person begin to match up their actions and intentions, it may also allow them to begin
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to achieve self-knowledge using Vellemans shortcut. The false explanation lls the explanatory gap between their actions and their intent, but if this allows more selfcontrol in the future, is also allows the person to gain the sort of self-knowledge that comes from acting on their own intentions. Thus if self-deception can aid self-control, paradoxically, it can aid self-knowledge. Mary Jean Walker, Philosophy Department, Macquarie University, Sydney NSW 2109, Australia. mary.walker@scmp.mq.edu.au Acknowledgements This paper was written with the support of The Restraint Project: Temperance and SelfControl in Australia. I thank James Franklin for many helpful conversations. I would also like to thank Catriona Mackenzie, Catherine Legg, and Jacqui Poltera, for their comments on drafts of the paper. NOTES
1 An overview of changing conceptions of this behaviour can be found in Gideon Yaffe, Recent work on addiction and responsible agency, Philosophy and Public Affairs 30,2 (2001): 178221. 2 Neil Levy, Self-deception and responsibility for addiction, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 20,2 (2003): 133142. 3 Levy op. cit., p. 140. 4 I use the term self in this paper in its sense of a persons own sense of their identity, or self-conception: the various attributes a person has which characterise them as an individual, and which taken together inform their reasons for action. 5 Levy op. cit., p. 133. 6 Levy focuses on the addicts responsibility for their beliefs and behaviour. 7 See Amelie O. Rorty, User-friendly self-deception, Philosophy, 69 (1994): 211228; Julia Kirsch, Whats so great about reality?, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 35,3 (2005): 407428; Shelley E. Taylor, Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1991). 8 There is some use of rst-personal reporting in psychological and sociological studies, but it is not the norm. See Michael Larkin & Mark D. Grifths, Experience of addiction and recovery: The case for subjective accounts, Addiction Research and Theory 10,3 (2002), 281311. For a discussion of the reasons this material tends to be discounted in psychiatric literature, see Jonathan Diamond, Narrative Means to Sober Ends (New York: Guilford Press, 2002), pp. 127128, 140. Since most discussions of self-described addicts focus on AA and its sister programs, it is appropriate to draw upon the AA literature and the reports of AA members, and so I here use almost solely reports from alcoholics. I will usually refer simply to addiction and addicts as I consider alcoholism to be an addiction, but given this method, my conclusions may not to apply to addictions that are relevantly different to alcoholism. 9 I take my cue here from developments in medical anthropology, which show how much medical practice can benet from attempting to understand the experience of illness, and assuming that people with a disease may have something relevant to say about it. See A. Kleinman & D. Seeman, Personal experience of illness in G. Albrecht, R. Fitzpatrick & S. Scrimshaw (eds) Handbook of Social Studies in Health and Medicine (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 230242. 10 Herbert Fingarette, Alcoholism and self-deception in M. W. Martin (ed.) Self-deception and selfunderstanding: New essays in philosophy and psychology (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, 1985), pp. 5267, see pp. 5253. 11 W. Ruddick, Social self-deceptions in A. O. Rorty & B. P. McLaughlin (eds) Perspectives on Self-deception (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), ch. 17, p. 380. 12 Marcia Baron, What is wrong with self-deception? in A. O. Rorty & B. P. McLaughlin (eds) Perspectives on Self-deception (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), ch. 20, p. 432.
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13 Levy op. cit., p. 136; see also George Vaillant, Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or cure?, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 39 (2005): 431436. 14 Fingarette, Alcoholism and self-deception op. cit., pp. 6264. 15 J. David Velleman, Self to Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 258263. 16 Velleman, Self to Self op. cit., p. 259.This idea is central to Vellemans theory of agency, developed in J. David Velleman, The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and J. David Velleman, Practical Reection (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Empirical evidence drawn from social psychology which supports the idea is provided in Velleman, Self to Self op. cit., pp. 224252. The material from Vellemans work that I draw on has many implications for his theory of agency, and for autonomy. I focus here only on what their application to cases of addictive behaviour can reveal. 17 Velleman, Self to Self op. cit., p. 259. 18 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition (USA: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001), p. 497. Available online at <http://www.aa.org/bigbookonline/en_tableofcnt.cfm>, accessed 20 February 2009. 19 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., p. 482. 20 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., pp. 269270. 21 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., pp. 539540. 22 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., p. 270. 23 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., p. 440. 24 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., p. 488. 25 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., p. 448. 26 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., p. 550. 27 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., pp. 506507. 28 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., pp. 243244. 29 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., p. 548. 30 Cheshire Calhoun, Losing ones self in C. Mackenzie & K. Atkins (eds) Practical Identity and Narrative Agency (New York: Routledge, 2008), ch. 9, pp. 204206. 31 Calhoun op. cit., p. 205. 32 Calhoun op. cit., pp. 204205. Calhoun considers addiction to be explicable as a case where agency itself is not diminished, just directed in unusual ways (p. 196). Addictions of the kind that concern me here do however undermine agential capacities, and are often connected with depression, alienation and estrangement. 33 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., p. 517. 34 Levy op. cit., p. 137. 35 Levy op. cit., p. 137. 36 For an overview of this research see Herbert Fingarette, Heavy Drinking:The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 3147. 37 Levy op. cit., p. 138. Levys analysis echoes those of Stanton Peele, The Diseasing of America: HowWe Allowed the Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1985) and Fingarette, Alcoholism and self-deception op.cit. 38 Some examples are Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story (NewYork: Random House, 1996), pp. 54, 118; Alice King, High Sobriety: Confessions of a Drinker (London: Orion, 2008), pp. 268269; and some of the accounts in Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., especially pp. 200207. An examination of AAs involvement with the disease concept of alcoholism is provided by Ernest Kurtz, Alcoholics Anonymous and the disease concept of alcoholism, Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly 20,3 & 4 (2002): 539. 39 In what follows I will generalise somewhat concerning the conception of addiction presented in AA literature and in members autobiographical reports. Presumably there is much individual variation, however. 40 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., pp. 30, 24, 34. 41 Anonymous cited in Kurtz op. cit., p. 29. 42 See especially steps 4, 8, and 9, in Anonymous, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (Australia: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 1996), pp. 67. 43 Larkin and Grifths op. cit., p. 303. 44 Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition op. cit., p. 273. 45 Larkin & Grifths op. cit., pp. 301302. 46 Many philosophers have been intrigued by self-fullling beliefs: beliefs that make themselves true in virtue of being believed: for instance William James, The will to believe, in The Will to Believe and Human Immortality (New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 131. This belief appears rather to make itself false in virtue of
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47 48 49 50 51

being believed, in cases where it does help the person change their behaviour. It sometimes becomes a self-fullling belief instead, becoming an excuse for relapse or continuing the addictive behaviour. The method is thus a precarious one, as critics have emphasised. King op. cit., p. 268. Knapp cited in Levy op. cit., p. 139. Fingarette, Alcoholism and self-deception op. cit., p. 61. Levy op. cit., pp. 139140. See Fingarette, Alcoholism and self-deception op. cit., p. 61; Vaillant op. cit., p. 434.

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