Thinking about Addiction: Hyperbolic Discounting and Responsible Agency. (Value Inquiry Book)

Thinking about Addiction

VIBS Volume 209 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Leonidas Donskis Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno George Allan Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A. Bryson C. Stephen Byrum Harvey Cormier Robert A. Delfino Rem B. Edwards Malcolm D. Evans Daniel B. Gallagher Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Francesc Forn i Argimon William Gay Dane R. Gordon J. Everet Green Heta Aleksandra Gylling

Matti Häyry Steven V. Hicks Richard T. Hull Michael Krausz Mark Letteri Vincent L. Luizzi Adrianne McEvoy Peter A. Redpath Arleen L. F. Salles John R. Shook Eddy Souffrant Tuija Takala Emil Višňovský Anne Waters James R. Watson John R. Welch Thomas Woods

a volume in Social Philosophy SP Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, Editor

Thinking about Addiction Hyperbolic Discounting and Responsible Agency

Craig Hanson With a Chapter by George Ainslie

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Cover photo: ©Morguefile.com Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2662-9 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2663-6 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in the Netherlands

Social Philosophy (SP) Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Editor

Another title in SP Evgenia Cherkasova, Dostoevsky and Kant: Dialogues on Ethics. 2009. VIBS 206

CONTENTS Editorial Foreword ANDREW FITZ-GIBBON

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Guest Foreword: Philosophy and Addiction LAWRENCE ASHLEY

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Acknowledgments

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ONE

Philosophical Perspectives on Theories of Addiction

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TWO

Addiction from the Behavioral Economist’s Point of View

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THREE

Ainsliean Selves

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FOUR

Self-Deception

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FIVE

Toward the Rationality of Bundling

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SIX

Responsibility

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SEVEN

Responsibility in a Reductionist Model GEORGE AINSLIE

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WORKS CITED

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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INDEX

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EDITORIAL FOREWORD In 1998, the philosophy department at SUNY Cortland took the innovative step to create a program focused on social philosophy. The key components of the program are social and political philosophy, ethics, and applied philosophy. In 2007, following the successful implementation of the program, the department formed the Center for Ethics Peace and Social Justice to extend the outreach of philosophy through publications, conferences, and a summer ethics institute for faculty, and philosophical practice and activism. As part of that outreach, we are delighted to co-sponsor a VIBS series in social philosophy. Craig Hanson’s Thinking about Addiction: Hyperbolic Discounting and Responsible Agency is the second in the series. Hanson’s book is a creative, and at times controversial, exploration of behavioral and economic models of addiction. It will be of interest to those considering philosophical accounts of addiction and those who want to reconsider moral responsibility and agency. Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Associate Professor in Philosophy Director, Center for Ethics, Peace and Social Justice State University of New York College at Cortland and VIBS Social Philosophy Special Series Editor

GUEST FOREWORD I feel privileged to be asked to comment on Dr. Craig Hanson’s path-breaking exploration of the connections between addiction and philosophy. The pairing is a unique one, as the voices of empirical sciences have dominated the discussion to this point. On the assumption that many people who read this book will not have had extensive training in philosophy, my primary aim in this foreword will be to sketch out the connection between Craig Hanson’s essay and a number of traditional philosophical questions. Hanson is himself a philosopher, and his writing exhibits philosophical techniques and references philosophical issues. I shall not bore the reader with an extensive treatment of what Hanson explicates. On the other hand, at a number of points, his exposition appears to me to involve philosophical issues that he skirts to keep his analysis on track. This is what I set out to fill in for the reader. It might also appear, as I sketch out philosophical problems in sequence, that I am being harsh or dismissive of the work Hanson and George Ainslie are doing. On the contrary, I have been very surprised at the richness of the philosophical issues addiction raises which I had not appreciated before I read their work, and while at a number of points I feel disposed to be contentious, I am also admiring of their progress and creativity. 1. What is addiction? It is interesting that Hanson does not take time out to define addiction. That would be standard philosophical practice. And in the case of addiction such an attempt seems more imperative than would be the case for many other concepts. Our culture as a whole is quite confused about what constitutes addiction. This is a harder question to answer than one might expect, given that the media, books and professionals in various fields wield the concept so confidently. A brief list of the things to which one might be said to be addicted would include alcohol, codeine, heroin, methadone, cocaine, cigarettes, chocolate, sex, pornography, hand washing, power, playing video games, and gambling. The Internet, blogging, Email, and other electronic pursuits have been described as addictive, and some pundits have claimed that the nation is addicted to war and oil. Thus, “addiction” shows all the signs of an idea in need of conceptual clarification. We could divide our list into substances to which people become addicted to ingesting and actions that people addictively repeat. Do we have any reason to consider injecting or ingesting substances more obviously addictive than performing actions? Perhaps only this: that the chemical connections between the injected or ingested substances and beta endorphins, triggering the limbic system, have been more thoroughly explored and explained than

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have the connections between actions and the release of beta endorphins. Researchers may clarify that causal connection (to actions) in the near future as we follow up on discoveries about the insula of the brain. I will return to this point below. So let us assume that, despite our tending to argue more about whether sex or video games really can be addictive, the substance-action distinction is not demonstrably a crucial or helpful distinction. Next, note that we have a range of descriptive terms we can apply to substance-ingestion or action repetition: An Addiction A Compulsion A Need An Urge A Self-indulgent choice A Habit, routine An Impulse A Whim I placed breaks in this list to suggest quantum breaks, and I would not quarrel too much if someone said that no actual spectrum could be made at all because some of these terms come in degrees, which would make a spectrum analysis implausible. But what is this a spectrum of ? I intended it as a scale of resistibility. What does the scale suggest? The top three items present genuine problems in terms of our freedom to liberate ourselves from them. The middle set is easier to modify, but still powerful in the ordinary domain of human action. The bottom group is relevant to our discussion, but suggests conditions more easily resisted if we so wish. We might be able to make a bit of progress in our inquiry by asking what the difference is between “compulsions” and “addictions.” We sometimes refer to gambling, as our original list suggested, as an addiction. But it is also (and perhaps more properly) called a compulsion. An element of social disapprobation may clearly be involved in calling something an addiction. Indeed, a radical critique of “addiction talk” persists, which suggests that denying that something is an addiction involves us in an inevitable clash with conventional models of economic propriety and personal health. Few things uncontroversially labeled addictions escape public disapprobation by sizeable proportions of the population. In other words, calling something an addiction may conspire with social attitudes toward the things ingested or actions pursued. Calling them addictions pathologizes them. Consider other human cravings for comparison purposes. Are we addicted to air? Are we addicted to ingesting liquids? To eating food? In all these cases, an acute craving occurs when we are deprived of them. It would

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not occur to us, except in jest, to refer to ourselves as addicted to these things, but perhaps only because no social disapprobation occurs in obtaining them to our satisfaction. We do not pathologize these things. By “an acute craving,” I do not mean an incredibly strong desire for something (else I would have to say, for a child who strongly desires a toy, that they are addicted to the toy, which seems wrong). I mean craving to be a bodily reaction on the level of raised blood pressure, feelings of intense physical need, panting in the case of thirst, and cramps in the case of hunger. These would be involved in the case of classic addictions. To extend the concept of addiction to gambling or video games or sex would be a “by convention” decision. In other words, they are not paradigm instances of addiction, though they share enough similarity to that condition that we may find it hard to draw an objective line, though we may draw a pragmatic one. I think we should not quarrel with calling things compulsions when they absorb too much of our lives and we find moderating them difficult. But in the absence of the physical symptoms—particularly panic in the mental sphere—we may be stretching things to apply the label of “addiction.” We thus arrive at panic, craving, and concurrent physiological distress as defining characteristics of addictions. 2. The Mind/Body Problem The “mind-body problem” is one of the most intractable of philosophical issues. I would suggest Hanson’s account raises it, but that fact is obscured by the technique of simply declaring that his analysis will pursue a behavioraleconomic model of addiction. This leads Hanson to give short shrift to the “visceral theorists,” who attempt a material account of addiction. That account has its problems, but so does Hanson’s theory. The mind-body problem would lead us to ask whether mental phenomena are reducible to body states (in the case of addiction, mostly brain states) or vice versa, and whether perhaps simply two languages are in use—a material, body language, which would employ statements referencing physiological facts (including brain states) and a mental language, which would reference only the mental world of ideas, emotions, or desires—that are both referring to the same thing. I may be able to make this point more easily later on, once I have introduced the next philosophical issue I want to highlight. 3. What about Materialism? A fundamental division in our accounts of human behavior centers on the issue of whether we want to explain human behavior in simply materialist terms or whether we need to admit selves, souls, spirit, and the like in our account. Classical (and much contemporary) science is significantly materialist in its assumptions, which cannot be said of philosophy. While many philo-

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sophers (namely, the Vienna circle, earlier empiricists and Karl Marx) have been materialists, the materialist view is thought to have many philosophically intractable problems. But surely, most contemporary discoveries (if not contemporary theories) that have been most productive have been in the materialist domain. The discovery that opiates are chemically so similar to endorphins (“encephalins” in British English), and the recent discovery that the insula has a varied and significant role in habit-formation and addiction, are two classic cases. I shall have more to say about the insula later, but for now, let me retail some of the language about the insula, which directly relate to the mind-body distinction I was discussing above. Here is a brief discussion of the insula from the New York Times Health section, attempting to acquaint Times readers with the newly discover dimensions of the insula, a quite material inner portion of the brain: [Neuroscientists] say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt, and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music. . . .The bottom line, according to Dr. Paulus and others, is that mind and body are integrated in the insula. It provides unprecedented insight into the anatomy of human emotions. . . . The insula itself is a sort of receiving zone that reads the physiological state of the entire body and then generates subjective feelings that can bring about actions, like eating, that keep the body in a state of internal balance. Information from the insula is relayed to other brain structures that appear to be involved in decision making, especially the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortices. (Sandra Blakeslee, “A Small Part of the Brain, and Its Profound Effects,” 6 February 2007) This is extraordinary language from a philosophical point of view, blithely assuming that we have no problems in moving from the brain to desire—and indeed there are no problems for a straightforward materialist who does not think that things like selves exist, who believes that mental states are reducible to brain-states or for double-language theorists as sketched above. But for all other philosophical positions, the supposition of the quotation is puzzling in the extreme. More importantly, Sandra Blakeslee’s supposition does not reside in the same framework as the one Hanson and Ainslie inhabit. They construct a view of addiction that creates problems within cognitive domains that are traditionally subject to conditions of rationality severed from material causal conditions, at least in major relevant part. Neither thinker would, of course, deny that addictive substances are causally and materially tied to those who are addicted. However, they add to the causal (material) chain a collection of mental states subject to a further rational dynamic. They assume that human beings still have the same choice and responsibility as human beings have for

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other human actions. What strikes them as apparent is that addicts make choices and that this choice-making so violates our sense of rationality that it is akrasic (demonstrating weakness of will) or requires the assumption of multiple selves to model. Note the utterly different account entailed by Blakeslee’s claim that the insula “reads the physiological state of the entire body and then generates subjective feelings that can bring about actions, like eating, that keep the body in a state of internal balance.” This is a materialist view that would replace rationality conditions with internal physical dynamics. Were we to critique Blakeslee, we would demand a much expanded explanation of the concept of “keeping the body in a state of internal balance,” but I think we have no room here for a rational decision theory approach. Why is all of this important? Well, primarily because from these initial philosophical commitments we would be led in totally different directions when it comes to the treatment of addiction. If we view addiction as dependent on a kind of cognitive failure, we will be attracted to psychologically and socially-based patterns of treatment like cognitive psychotherapy or Alcoholics Anonymous. Curiously, these treatments leave plenty of room for the notion of the addicts’ responsibility for their condition. In both of these treatment mechanisms, learning to accept individual responsibility may be precisely the central point of treatment. On the other hand, if we think as a materialist does in this context, we put our money on studies of the way encephalin and the insula (and perhaps other brain dynamics yet to be uncovered) may be investigated and manipulated as the best way to treat addiction. Such models have remarkably little scope for responsibility, blame, and condemnation. The therapeutic model, without an emphasis on volition, reigns. Were I out to make the materialist’s case, I would point to the incredibly material aspects of addiction. When I am addicted, I do not just want something and want it terribly; every cell of my body cries out for it. My eyes drip for it. My nose runs for it. My muscles quiver for it. This is not an abstract and Olympian debate within my mind; it is an assault on my bodily being. Hanson (and perhaps Ainslie) would not have too much problem conceding all this, as he thinks of himself as operating on proto-addicts, who are still making choices and still subject to rational thought and responsible choice. Their targets are not the novice just on the point of experimentation (classic cases of people who think that the causal deluge will not touch them or for whom capitulation to social pressure overrides prudential worries), but people who are semi-in-thrall. This is key; in this context, I appreciate Ainslie’s passing reference to his view that addiction may be best viewed as an evolutionary process. That is a wonderful proposal, which neither Ainslie nor Hanson (at least in the texts we have before us) follows up. Static models may be poorly designed to capture the complexities of developing addiction, and perhaps others will pursue this further. I, however, want to proceed with my list of philosophical issues raised by the present inquiry.

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THINKING ABOUT ADDICTION 4. The Theory of Theories

Theory is a particularly thorny area. What do we expect from a theory or a model? That it is predictive? Verifiable? That an experimentum crucis be present by which we can test its validity? These are all standard issues in the philosophy of science, and I think Hanson’s discussion makes us drag them out for review. It may well be the case that Hanson’s theory is in precisely the same predicament as string theory is in physics. String theory posits a mathematical model of space, time, and matter that entails ten, eleven, or twentysix dimensions (I am not making this up) and, arguably, parallel universes. Now this theory can be manipulated and correlated with many things in the Einsteinian universe (which does not entail a definite number of dimensions but from which an infinite number of universes cannot be said to be entailed). But how do we know whether the theory is true (or, if you dislike “true,” then “to be accepted or embraced”)? We have no ways of verifying it. No empirical evidence has been found in favor of it. It just may, arguably, model things. But it may model them on non-real or imaginary things. Is the eleventh dimension real? How do we tell? Are tachyons real? How do we tell? Are strings mathematical entities or space-time entities? Enough of the perplexities of modern physics. How does this connect to Hanson’s work? Are multiple contesting selves real in any sense? How can we tell? If we can construct a model of addiction, do we not have the additional chore of deciding whether the model is a nifty invention or whether it genuinely advances our understanding of the phenomenon to be modeled? I want to be careful here, for while I think this is an issue, and a serious one, I would not want the reader to dismiss Hanson’s analysis on the basis of these issues. After all, string theory bodes well to occupying thousands of physicists despite there being noted and notable philosophical issues for string theorists. The fact that there remain philosophical problems about Hanson’s model or string theory does not mean that the model should be abandoned, only that the model provokes other issues for those attracted to it. Let the dissertations begin. 5. Selves I am conscious in much of what I have written above that I have no research experience with addiction, so I speak as an outsider. On the other hand, I have often researched and taught about personal identity. So I would like to pull a more familiar rabbit out of the philosophical hat. From a philosophical point of view, I must point out that many people have questioned the Western concept of a self. Buddhism, on quite non-Western grounds, agues against the kind of self without which Hanson cannot pose his theory. David Hume doubted that anyone seriously committed to empiricism could demonstrate that a self or unitary consciousness exists. Now I do not

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want to enter into a detailed exposition of any particular theory, but I am cautious about assuming that we know what we are talking about when we talk about a self. Is it, perhaps, an indirect way of bowing before the theological notion of a soul? Not for Hanson, and not for me either, as I do not believe in a soul and Hanson never for a moment opens this possibility. But his readers? If we have difficulties with the notion of a single self, how do we convincingly evoke multiple selves? This is not just a problem for Hanson, but for several post-modern theories of the self that bifurcate the self at will. I find all these theories make me want to press harder on the theorist to give independent evidence beyond the utility within their model as a justification for the multiple-self view. Perhaps Hanson’s readers will be more charitable than I am on this issue—we are in the realm of philosophical disputation here, and I wanted to lay my philosophical cards on the table. 6. The Theory of Human Action Hanson very consciously addresses one final philosophical issue. He displays no doubt that the primary way we deconstruct human action is via a rational choice model. Within this framework, the actions of addicts appear deeply irrational in a way that requires, he thinks, a sophisticated extension of Ainslie’s “Hyperbolic Discounting Model.” But here is a classic philosophical problem: to what degree do people, in reality, subject their decisions to rational criteria? Hume, Bertrand Russell, and a host of other philosophers have argued that philosophy routinely overstates the role of reason in human life. Sure, if I am choosing between jobs or selecting a college, the rational models of choice are convincing. But how much of an ordinary (or extraordinary) day fits into rational models? The rational model does not fit the way I ordinarily choose what to wear (though there are a few occasions where it may), whether I brush my teeth, or whether I let my dog outside (she usually decides that, though I do it). Decision theory in particular and the field of economics in general struggle with the same issue. The assumptions they make in order to enable their mathematical and logical operations, may be poor models of genuine human choosing precisely because they overstate the role of logic, rationality (defined as maximizing self interest) and calculation in our lives. The reader will have to decide whether Hanson and Ainslie make of our behavior something more characteristically rational than it is. This is a significant issue to keep in mind as you read—the answer may not be a simple one. 7. The Insula Again I want to return to the insula, that deep-brain structure I mentioned above. Several interesting features of the insula will tie together a few of the issues I have raised. The recent notable discovery about the insula involved patients

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who had had strokes involving the insula and who instantly lost their addiction to cigarettes. This finding in itself would be intriguing, but the authors of the study, while concentrating on smoking cessation, acknowledged, “It would be interesting to see how insula damage affects other learned pleasures” (Naqvi, Rudrauf, Damasio, and Bechara, 2007). The complex role that the insula plays explains why this might be an intriguing place to start. From Blakeslee again: Another neuroscientist, Arthur D. Craig at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, went on to describe exactly the circuitry that connects the body to the insula. According to Dr. Craig, the insula receives information from receptors in the skin and internal organs. Such receptors are nerve cells that specialize in different senses. Thus there are receptors that detect heat, cold, itch, pain, taste, hunger, thirst, muscle ache, visceral sensations and so-called air hunger, the need to breathe. The sense of touch and the sense of the body’s position in space are routed to different brain regions, he said. Thus, in the “definition” section with which we began, the roles of “air hunger,” thirst, and hunger, all being situated with the nicotine-craving locus, suggests, but does not entail, that we might not have been too far off in lumping the activities of breathing, eating, and drinking with addictions, although we did so on the basis of the physiological consequences of deprivation instead of their cohabitation in the same organ of the brain. If we take seriously this more materialist clue about addiction, not only must much philosophical work be done in theories of human action and resurrecting some features of the mind-body problem, but also, in dialogue with the more reason-oriented approach of Hanson and Ainslie, we may make progress in understanding a significant human problem. Lawrence Ashley, Professor Philosophy Department State University of New York College at Cortland, New York

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people helped make this book possible. Edward McClennen provided helpful criticism and advice. George Ainslie, too, made several significant suggestions and dealt graciously with the intellectual meanderings of a philosopher. I thank him for his generosity. John Monterosso reviewed the manuscript and made key suggestions about issues I might otherwise have overlooked. Fred Browning provided helpful technical advice. Several people at a variety of conferences gave me constructive criticism and further insight that I may otherwise have missed. David Athey, James Swick, David Horkott, and Samuel Joeckel provided invaluable help and advice. Finally, Andrew FitzGibbon and Larry Ashley provided insightful critique and invaluable advice. I thank Danielle and Paul for their constant encouragement. As always, any errors are solely mine.

One PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THEORIES OF ADDICTION 1. Introduction Why do some people acquire addictions? Are they unaware of the consequences that such behaviors have on their lives, or are they aware of the consequences, but do not care? Are addictive behaviors chosen or compelled? What bearing might coercion have upon moral responsibility for the addict? More fundamentally, what is an addiction? This book examines the behavioral economic models of addiction, which have been used, or could reasonably be used, to explain addiction. In what follows, I offer a philosophical narrative of these theories to demonstrate the helpful role that an analysis of self-deception might play in the clarification of what I deem to be the most promising account of addiction—George Ainslie’s Hyperbolic Discounting Model. I begin by asking basic philosophical questions, and imagine how different theorists would respond to them, motivating my argument as I go. Theories of addiction and addictive behavior lie almost exclusively outside the domain of philosophy, usually occurring within the fields of clinical psychology and other behavioral sciences, and sometimes within behavioral economic models. I will primarily focus on the behavioral economic and social scientific models, and treat the issues in a philosophical manner, probing and modifying current positions. Of the variety of behavioral economic models, I will be most centrally concerned with the recent work of George Ainslie (1992b; 2001). I will offer some proposals to resolve difficulties he poses for his own explanation of addiction, raise other issues, and offer proposals to resolve them. My primary focus will be the possibility and rationality of the activity that Ainslie calls “bundling.” While Ainslie takes bundling to be the cure for the irrationality of hyperbolic discounting, at the same time, he is critical of the bundling cure. Ainslie expresses serious reservations whether bundling is even a possible human behavior and if possible, whether bundling would be at all desirable (Ainslie, 1992b; 1999; 2001). In this volume, I argue for the possibility, rationality, and desirability of bundling. In Chapter Two, I will consider whether Ainslie’s is a model of addiction, or one that merely describes temptation. The two terms have slightly different connotations in common English. While the term “addiction” presupposes behaviors that are outside voluntary control, action that results from

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yielding to temptation appears to connote actions of agents who merely suffer from a moment, however long, of moral weakness. I argue that unless we implausibly loosen the definition of the term addiction, Ainslie’s system does not give us sufficient conditions for acquiring an addiction. But augmenting Ainslie’s model in relatively minor ways does succeed in yielding a plausible model of addiction. Finally, I will address the issue of moral responsibility for Ainsliean agents, showing that addicts, under Ainslie’s model, are responsible for at least some of their addictive behavior. With these provisional theses articulated, let me now more specifically address the nature of the arguments behind them. On the topic of bundling and the negative side effects that bundling behavior affords, I argue that a central problem for addicts—one that Ainslie never discusses—is self-deception. Addicts are frequently in a position to view themselves as self-deceived and by viewing themselves as such, they are in a position to engage in bundling behavior that also avoids the negative side effects of that behavior. Bringing the notion of self-deception to bear on a discussion of Ainslie can help to solve some theoretical problems he identifies in his work. Standardly, self-deception occurs when an agent intentionally acquires a belief whose propositional content is mutually contradictory to another belief that the agent consciously holds. In Chapter Four, I consider modifications to this definition and create a new model of self-deception according to which selfdeception is a motivated error, occurring when an individual attempts to accommodate the preferences of another. I will also propose two basic principles to account for the moral responsibility of agents of the sort that Ainslie describes. I propose that persons are morally responsible for knowingly failing to attempt to resolve life problems, provided that they believe that resolvable life problems exist. I also propose that persons are morally responsible (blameworthy) if they repeatedly attempt to resolve those problems via a method for which abundant inductive evidence exists that attests to its likely failure. Neither of these principles will necessarily give other persons (other than the person with the addiction) the knowledge they would need to justifiably cast praise or blame on the addict. Instead, I argue that these principles capture the essence of a moral property that addicts may have, such as the property of “being in the right” or “being in the wrong.” But we may never be in a position to know that the addict has such a moral property. I will be discussing these theories from a philosophical perspective. This is crucial to remember because, while I will portray these theories as constituting different kinds of reactions to philosophical ideas, not all proponents of them would agree. We see these positions articulated in the sciences independent of the workings of the dominant philosophical establishment. In Chapter Two, I will more fully probe these theories.

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Throughout this book, I use the term addiction as opposed to terms such as “substance abuse” or “substance dependence.” While excessive usage of the term addiction has contributed to the extension of the term to cover nonsubstance cases that in some respects appear to resemble addictions (such as gambling), I chose to use the term to leave the door open to the possibility that these other, non-substance abuse behaviors lie within the term’s scope. 2. Basic Concepts A useful way to begin the discussion of addiction theories is to ask whether addicts have control over their addiction and over their choice to engage in the addictive behavior. If we were to answer that the addict has no control over the addiction, then a suitable account of addiction would be the “visceral account.” A visceral account of addiction is one that construes the addict as being the victim of uncontrollable urges—probably (though not necessarily) attributable to neurobiological adaptation to some substance—which overwhelm the agent, rendering deliberation ineffective and effacing freedom of choice. George Lowenstein (1999) and Jon Elster (1999a) defend this view. A “strong visceral account” (my term) would assert that not only is addiction properly explained by such visceral factors, but also that we need no other explanation for addiction other than the appeal to visceral forces. Even Elster and Lowenstein do not endorse such an extreme view. Too much evidence exists that shows addicts do have some control over their addictions. Addicts willingly plan and prepare for their addictions, even while not under the strong urges to engage in the addictive behavior. Addicts will, for example, commit themselves to inpatient rehabilitation to “come clean” and at the same time smuggle drugs into the treatment center in order to help them through the impending ordeal. Drug addicts might stockpile supplies in advance of the onset of visceral forces. If the only factors that caused a person to be an addict were visceral forces, such behavior in the absence of those forces either would be inexplicable, or would not take place. Some people are capable of overcoming their viscerally caused desires and succeed in eschewing their addiction—a feat that would be impossible were addiction to be always overpowering. The only possible way to recover from an addiction, if the strong visceral account is all there is to addiction, would be due to other forces that are also unconnected to the addict’s will. These might include circumstances in which one’s body becomes physically incapable of ingesting the drug, or circumstances in which the drug becomes physically unavailable to the addict. But what would not happen, on a strong visceral view, is the agent’s summoning up the will to overcome the addiction. Most addicts who desire to overthrow their addiction report raging internal conflicts—something that would not occur if their inclinations were utterly lopsided. These observations are not terribly problematic for visceral theorists. These theorists never claim that addiction is solely attributable to visceral

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influences. As it happens, visceral theorists claim that while visceral influences may at times be overpowering, they are not always so. The agent does have, at some point, a degree of control, even over decisions concerning whether to engage in the addictive behavior. On the therapeutic side, what visceral theorists advocate is that addicts take advantage of those moments of control wisely and use them to put in place obstacles to their addictive behavior. Later on, when the addicted agent is subjected to the overpowering urges, the obstacles might block them. By way of example, if the nicotine addict has control now, it might have someone hide its cigarettes so that later on, when the urge is overpowering, the addict is unable to give in to the urge to smoke. A person with an alcohol addiction might have someone hide the car keys or pour out all of the alcohol so that later on the addict will not be able to drink or to obtain alcohol. These types of strategies are called “precommitment devices,” and are paradigmatically symbolized by Ulysses’ tying himself to a mast ahead of time to avoid the compulsion he believes will overtake him upon hearing the Sirens’ song (Strotz, 1957; Elster, 1979). A close variant of the precommitment device is “sophisticated choice” (McClennen, 1997) according to which an agent forecasts now which actions are feasible in the future, and rejects any course of action now that is not, in the future, feasible. Sophisticated choice is merely a close variant, not a synonym for the term precomittment device. The notion of precommitment is utterly tyrannical. An individual’s future self is forced by a past self into a decision or state. On the contrary, a sophisticated choice is one that might avoid the tyranny by opting for a strategy a future self may choose willingly. The precommitter need have no respect for the future self, while the sophisticated chooser may have a great deal of respect for that future self. Once we grant that addicted agents may have control at some times, we are left to explain what occurs during those moments when the deliberative processes of the agent do have influence on action, when agents appear to be knowingly and freely opting for inferior alternatives. If we take such a possibility seriously, a myriad of explanations are available, all of which have significant philosophical components to them. If we are to discuss the possibility of agents willingly or knowingly opting in favor of courses of action that they deem to be inferior, we have just tread upon well-worn philosophical ground known as akrasia. The term akrasia means incontinence or lack of mastery. Traditional cases of akrasia occur when the agent performs an action that the agent deems to, or if the agent fails to perform an action that the agent deems to be superior to the one that the agent did perform (provided the agent was free to do either action and had the ability to do either action). Cases of akrasia, then, involve an incongruity between judgment and action.

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The debate over akrasia is not a new one, and its current parameters continue to be dominated by the insights of the ancients. Understanding the positions of Plato and Aristotle will allow us to better understand current work on the topic. Plato devotes a long passage to the concept of akrasia in the Protagoras (351b–354c) and Republic (439e–440b). In neither case does he explicitly use the term. Aristotle later coined the term. But the concept is unmistakable in these passages. In Protagoras, and less clearly in the Republic, he famously concludes that akrasia is impossible. In cases of alleged akrasia, Plato claims, agents in question might have been ignorant about what they were doing. Or, it may be the case that agents change their values after performing the action and begin to regret what they did in the past. Alleged cases of akrasia may also be cases in which the “appetitive” portion of the soul overrides the “rational” portion of the soul (this is the Visceral Account). This suggestion appears to be what Plato claims in the Republic. But we should never conclude, Plato insists, that any agent ever chooses in favor of an option that it believes to be inferior or over which the agent had the ability and occasion to refrain from choosing. Aristotle, who was the first to use the term akrasia, struggles at length to explain the concept (Nicomachean Ethics, VII.1–10). Noting that Plato argued for its nonexistence in human behavior, Aristotle argues contrary to Plato, its possibility. We can, he wants to show, behave akratically in a fully intentional manner. Many people, Aristotle argues, who appear to be candidates for akrasia, are merely impetuous. They routinely perform actions without reasoning about them, and later regret them. Others are morally weak. They reason out their actions, but fail to do what reason dictates. Impetuosity poses little conceptual problem. That a person may end up performing actions that they immediately regret when they failed to reason through those actions before performing them is not difficult to imagine. The morally weak are those who require our scrutiny. Aristotle claims that morally weak akratic agents have limited knowledge of what they are doing. Their knowledge is not utterly effaced as was the case under Plato’s proposal. Instead, akratic agents are like actors on a stage who repeat lines. They know what they are saying or judging, and to some degree have understanding of their beliefs and attitudes, but somehow fail to grasp their meaning. The cause of the failure, according to Aristotle, is the passions. Aristotle’s treatment of the morally weak ends up looking similar to Plato’s discussion of the person ruled by the appetites, despite the fact that Aristotle claimed to be providing a dissimilar account. In this debate between Plato and Aristotle we see crucial facets of the current work being done on the issue. While we might be tempted to say that akrasia occurs commonly in human behavior, the act of offering an explanation for those occurrences might unintentionally explain away the phenomenon. To offer an explanation, such as that akrasia occurs when the passions

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overwhelm reason, might be tantamount to stating that, at the moment of having performed the action, the agent falsely deemed the allegedly akratic action to be superior, not inferior. If this is the explanation given for apparently akratic action, then the explanation appears prima facie to explain away akrasia. Regardless of the success or failure of attempted models of akrasia, a few things remain constant since Plato and Aristotle wrote: akratic action involves judgment and action, and occurs when persons’ better judgment is not the basis for their action. The ancient debate continues today, as a large upsurge in literature on akrasia continues to emerge. The literature on the issue tends to be divided between two distinct research projects: the conceptual and the explanatory. On the conceptual side, philosophers have attempted to understand whether the notion of akrasia is itself coherent, and whether this one term akrasia might serve as a blanket phrase for a variety of other related phenomena. Generally, philosophers acknowledge that the term akrasia ought to be distinguished from other related terms. Alternate phenomena might include accidie, in which judging does not necessarily bring about any desire, weakness of will (which involves knowingly giving in to some temptation), compulsion (cases in which the agent is not able to do what it wants more), or self-deception (in which an agent manages to believe something which the person believes is not true, and in which the agent intentionally brings about that belief) (Stocker, 1979). On the explanatory side, philosophers have attempted to show how, given that akrasia is possible, the phenomenon occurs. It is my sense that the bulk of the literature on akrasia appearing in philosophical studies pertains to addressing the conceptual possibility of akrasia, and that relatively little of it explains the phenomenon’s occurrences. Conceptually, the literature offers just as much Platonic skepticism about the existence of akrasia as ever. Richard Mervyn Hare (1952) argues that allegedly akratic agents do not truly judge either that the superior but unchosen action is better, or they are not free to do that action. Gary Watson (1977) disputes that while akratic agents might have some epistemic fault, that fault is not akrasia (they may have been in error about what is right or, following Hare, they may not have been free in the first place). But in neither case are agents strictly akratic. On the other hand, some philosophers who accept the possibility of akratic action might want to explain how such an action occurs. Primarily responding to Hare (1952), Donald Davidson (1970) argues that akratic action occurs when a person judges one thing to be the better of all things considered, as opposed to categorically better. Akrasia is an action contrary to a prima facie all-things-considered judgment, but not against that which is valued most, absolutely speaking. Davidson (ibid.) does not discuss the possibility of being a strict akratic agent, one who acts contrary to what one unconditionally deems superior.

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Later (1985), he offers another model attempting to explain just these phenomena. According to the later model, Davidson explains strict akratic action by positing the existence of mental partitioning. Other philosophers have rejected strict akrasia, while permitting other versions (Mele, 2001). Returning to our theories of addiction, we can see that they too appear to follow many of these philosophical intuitions. For example, Rational Choice Theory implicitly rejects the conceptual possibility of akratic action. Following Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy (1988), the Rational Choice model of addiction presupposes that addiction is not merely the product of irresistible forces, such as the visceral wind that tugs at Aristotle’s overwhelmed agent in Nicomachean Ethics VII. Instead, addicts make free, informed choices. Presupposing the famous (and presently ubiquitous) Rational Choice paradigm, Becker and Murphy suggest that agents might find themselves in a position in which they are aware of the negative consequences of their addictive behavior, but they opt in favor of that behavior nonetheless. Such agents would do so because they value the future consequences of actions far less than the rest of us, were the rest of us in their circumstances. The perplexity of non-addicts when it comes to the evaluation of addicts is that we cannot imagine what it would be like to value the future so little. The Becker and Murphy theory suggests that what differs between those who are addicts and those who are not, are their differing degrees of future discounting. Addicts value the future little while non-addicts value the future highly. While they do not explicitly say so, we might be tempted to conclude that their hypothesis concerning the etiology of addiction is that a necessary condition for having an addiction is to have a steep future discount rate. Future discounting is a standard topic of discussion within behavioral economics, especially in the last fifty years. The concept is simple. Persons have the tendency to discount the value of a good, the farther off it is in the future. For example, while $100 at this moment might be quite valuable to me right now, that same $100 might not be as valuable to me a year from now if I can only receive it in one year’s time. Analogously, I would likely be more motivated to perform a task to receive that money immediately than I would be motivated to perform the same task to get the same amount of money after a year’s delay. If this facile example is indicative of human valuation of future goods, that persons devalue the future would appear to be a common human behavior. Behavioral economists claim that not only is this true, but also that no agent is to be praised or blamed for the extent to which they discount the future. The only prominent philosopher who disagrees with this injunction is John Rawls, in his A Theory of Justice (1973, pp. 274–309, sec. 43–47). Rawls claims that all future discounting is irrational. While it is worthwhile to enter into a discussion of this challenging point of Rawls’, doing so would be a distraction because behavioral economics has operated largely in contradiction with Rawls’ position on this issue. I will

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therefore follow suit and, for the sake of argument, assume that to praise or blame an agent for the extent to which the agent values the future is inappropriate. If the assumptions of behavioral economists are true, and the degree of future discounting that an agent happens to have is neither good nor bad, then Becker and Murphy’s addicts are not proper recipients of the term akrasia. On Becker and Murphy’s view, agents, including addicts, always do what they judge to be best. Neither are Becker-Murphy addicts self-deceived. Except for recent developments on the notion of self-deception (Mele, 2001), self-deception is usually construed by philosophers as an intentional behavior that results in the acquisition of a (usually false) belief whose propositional content is mutually contradictory to another belief that the agent also has. For example, if all my evidence leads me to believe that I am a sub-par guitarist, and if I do not desire to hold that belief, I may endeavor to believe the opposite—that I am an above-par player. In such a case, I intentionally, though falsely, come to believe something that is in contradiction to another belief I already have. These two conditions for self-deception—intentionality and contradiction—do not occur in Becker-Murphy addicts. Becker-Murphy addicts believe that opting for drug-usage is best, and might believe based on all available evidence and, at the same time, have no desire to believe otherwise. Becker-Murphy addicts are doing exactly what they most want. Philosophically, the Becker-Murphy hypothesis has some merits, for there is no doubt that stepping into the waters of akrasia significantly complicates matters. This view claims to be able to avoid those waters, perhaps only requiring a straightforward visceral account to do so. The benefits of avoiding the complexities come at a steep price, because the Becker-Murphy model fails to adequately explain the behavior of addicts. It is implausible to assume that addicts of the kind Becker and Murphy describe exist. Notoriously, addicts are under-informed, deceptive, and frequently engage in denial. One of the problems with the evidence-gathering habits of addicts is that they tend to acquire too little information. Addicts routinely acknowledge that they desire better lives than they presently have. Many make efforts to overcome their addictions—an effort that would be akratic if Becker and Murphy were right. If the desire to maximize whatever consequences the agent takes to be best for them had led them to addiction, then attempting to overcome an addiction that a person has just rationally opted for would be to attempt to perform an action contrary to a person’s better judgment (assuming that the pre-addiction and post-addiction knowledge base is the same). Therefore, for Becker-Murphy models of addiction, recovery would be a species of akrasia. If we are to claim that addiction is not merely the consequence of irresistible visceral forces, and if the avoidance of akrasia in the manner attempted by the Rational Choice Theorist is implausible, we appear to be at a

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loss to explain addiction. What we need is a scientifically suitable explanation that also manages to incorporate akrasia into its scheme. These two tasks are what George Ainslie attempts to perform in the development of his Hyperbolic Discounting Model. The majority of Chapter Two will be dedicated to a discussion of Ainslie, to show how different his explanation is from the others already mentioned, and to probe into the underlying difficulties within his view. A brief explanation is in order for now. Ainslie claims that persons chronically suffer from preference reversals. Reversals are not reserved for a few persons with moral or rational failings, but are endemic to the human condition. He conceives human behavior as being deeply akratic, with consistent behavior being a remarkable achievement. Akrasia is the norm, not the exception. He reasons that human agents act according to a future valuation scheme, which necessarily lends itself to irrationality. This is the Hyperbolic Discounting Model. This model, when graphed, shows that the valuation of goods into the future follows a deeply bowed, or “hyperbolic,” form, instead of a consistent gradual rise. In the next chapter, I offer a detailed discussion of the genesis of the hyperbolic discount function, but I can give a few introductory remarks here. Given the fundamental equation that every human agent uses in the valuation of any two goods—an inferior good that comes first in time and a superior or greater good that comes later—the good I presently deem inferior will “spike” in its valuation, and cross over and above the valuation of the superior good, provided that there is a sufficient amount of time between the acquisitionpoint of the two goods. The implication is that I will be “giving in” constantly to nearer rewards. So, if a person is always predisposed to preference reversals, the person becomes a remarkably good candidate for addictions. If Ainslie’s model succeeds in plausibly describing human nature, and if that description requires us to presuppose chronically choosing in favor of inferior goods, then we would expect to see human beings making many bad choices, including addictive behaviors. We do see just that. But whether preference reversal alone constitutes an account of addiction is a conclusion I will dispute shortly. Ainslie’s proposed solution to the problem of preference reversals is to bundle our choices. When we find ourselves at a moment of decision, we must not only think of our choice as having an impact upon the present, but upon an entire set of like choices over time. If an agent believes that giving in to a short-term urge is simultaneously to resolve to give into that urge on every future occasion, the motivation to give in to the urge in the present diminishes. For while the agent’s preferences may have reversed with regards to the agent’s present choice, the agent’s preferences have not yet reversed with regards to all of the agent’s future choices. Viewing the present decision as a decision over all similar choices in the future, Ainslie insists, will cause the agent to opt against what in the present is a temporary preference for an inferior good.

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When it comes to addictions, bundling agents are not to ask themselves whether to give into temptation on this particular occasion. Instead, agents are to consider whether always to use addictive substances on every occasion. Using them now sets a precedent for always using them; not using them now sets a precedent for never using them. Deciding in this manner is synonymous with bundling according to a rule. Should we do so, we avoid the negative consequences that we would face were we to give in to preference reversals, provided that the moments of preference reversal were ones that would deprive us of overall utility. Herein lies what Ainslie takes to be the most problematic portion of his theory. On the one hand, he has proposed bundling as a solution to the problem of hyperbolic discounting and, more specifically, the irrationality that hyperbolic discounting produces. But given that hyperbolic discounting is the status quo of human valuation, how we could ever bring ourselves to valuate in any other manner is not obvious. Even if we were able to do so, Ainslie claims in no uncertain terms, doing so may not be desirable. For example, if I have a chronic problem with over-spending, I might adopt the following rule: Only use my financial resources to purchase food and to pay bills. In many cases, this would turn out to be a financially advantageous rule to follow. I would not be expending my financial resources on goods that I do not need. However, if I were to always follow that rule, I may miss opportunities that all might agree I ought not miss. If, by way of an absurd example, I were to find a Van Gogh masterpiece at a garage sale with a price tag of one dollar, then following my rule with respect to the Van Gogh painting would be disadvantageous for my overall utility. But in more moderate cases, we could imagine that following the rule could serve to make me compulsive to the rule itself instead of to the utility that the rule was intended to provide. If, for example, it is true that breaking a rule one time will permit me to acquire more happiness than following it, and thereby incur no disutility, and if I know this to be true, I ought to break the rule. Following the rule in such a case would be compulsive. Here, Ainslie’s criticism of his solution resembles criticisms of the psychology of Kantian deontology (Langton, 1992). Individuals risk valuing rules more than the goods that the rules are intended to produce. If hyperbolic discounting explains addiction, and if bundling is the cure for the irrationalities of hyperbolic discounting, it is the possibility, rationality, and desirability of bundling behavior that deserves the most attention. These problems will receive significant treatment beginning in Chapter Three. Now that we have provisionally explained Ainslie’s view on akrasia, we are in a position to see how an analysis of self-deception would be illuminating. Obviously, Ainslie considers himself to have made a significant contribution to the literature on akrasia. His theory explains why agents might perform actions that are inconsistent with what they believe to be best for them. I agree that his model does provide a proper explanation for this phenomenon. How-

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ever, what Ainslie ignores is the highly unusual epistemic situation in which such an agent would be, and it is to that epistemic condition to which I will turn my attention. I will be concerned with what Ainsliean akratic agents believe while they are performing their action. I will therefore ignore the problem of impetuosity, which occupies an important role in Aristotle’s discussion of the concept. I contend that while engaging in akratic action, agents also engage in self-deception: the agents may come to believe that the akratic action in question is best for them. This is an understandable deception, for at the time of action, the akratic action is what they prefer. Abstinent agents who desire to view themselves as rational, but who also believe that at some time in the past they preferred addictive goods, might be led to falsely conclude that they presently value addictive consumption over abstinence. To view themselves as not preferring addictive goods is to admit that their preferences are unstable and irrational. In an effort to fulfill their desire to view themselves as rational, they self-deceptively conclude that they do prefer addictive substances. Addicts are frequently in the position of suspecting that such a belief is false. Should it be the case that they suspect this, they are in a position to rid themselves of their self-deception. In the next chapters, I will explain just how this would occur given Ainslie’s system and use my account to resolve the previously mentioned problems in Ainslie’s work. 3. Overview Chapters Two through Five build toward a defense of bundling as a possible and rational behavior. By understanding the unique nature of the self as found in Ainslie’s work, we can acquire a new understanding of self-deception. With this view of self-deception in place, I will claim that bundling is none other than recovering from self-deception. Chapter Six uses the previous work of the book to account for moral responsibility for hyperbolically discounting agents. In Chapter Two, I will scrutinize three models of addiction, demonstrating the superiority of Ainslie’s view. I question whether his is a theory of addiction or temptation. I conclude by claiming that adding a meager visceral account to Ainslie’s model can result in a model of addiction while retaining the core insights of the Hyperbolic Discounting Model. In Chapter Three, I discuss the nature of the self found in Ainslie. Building on that understanding, I will create a new model of self-deception in Chapter Four—one that meets the demands of the literature that predates it, which also takes seriously the nature of the self that Ainslie’s model appears to imply. In my model, self-deception is a species of error that resembles rationalization contrary to known evidence. A self-deceiver deceives one’s self when the deceiver attempts to rationally accommodate near-past preferences

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that the self-deceiver does not presently hold. This is a wholly understandable error to make, when we view ourselves as rational over time. In Chapter Five, I use my model of the self to show how bundling behaviors is possible and rational. When agents become aware of their selfdeception, they realize they are no longer rational. Absent the agent’s belief that the agent is rational, the agent no longer needs to create an ex facto justification for unacceptable behavior. Bundling then becomes possible by disavowing past preferences. In Chapter Six, I attempt to show how my model of self-deception and bundling behavior might hold an addict morally responsible. I offer two weak principles. The first is that a person is morally responsible should it be the case that the person not attempt to change something in its life that it believes to be tremendously harmful. The second is that addicts are to be blamed should they continue to attempt to implement a strategy that has repeatedly failed in the past. I will begin by revisiting the visceral account, Rational Choice Theory, and Ainslie’s model of addiction in a more rigorous manner. My objective is to show why Ainslie’s model deserves such attention not only in philosophy proper, but also in behavioral economics.

Two ADDICTION FROM THE BEHAVIORAL ECONOMIST’S POINT-OF-VIEW 1. Introduction In Chapter One, I portrayed different behavioral economic models in virtue of the ways in which they would respond to some basic philosophical questions. These models have been created not so much against a philosophical backdrop, but against the backdrop of development in the empirical and behavioral sciences. In this chapter, I will scrutinize more closely these models of addiction to bolster my contention that George Ainslie’s model not only is the most promising one for philosophers, but also for decision theorists, economists, and behavioral scientists. I also argue that Ainslie more adequately describes the phenomenon of addiction than any other available account. But even though Ainslie may capture the features of addiction better than any other available alternative, I will claim that he does not capture the phenomenon completely. His model is capable of explaining why agents might acquiesce to temptation at any single choice-node (Ainslie and Monterosso, 2003b), but it fails to show how that temptation might become an addiction. I will propose that adding a visceral feature to his account—adaptation to the object of temptation—will render the sufficient and necessary conditions for having an addiction. I will first display the models, and then discuss the link between Ainslie’s model and addiction proper. 2. Models of Addiction—A Deeper Look The term akrasia tends to be used almost exclusively by philosophers, not economists. But that is not to suggest that economists have nothing to say about the concept. Among the many close analogies to the concept of akrasia within behavioral economics is the problem of the “money pump.” The presumption among economists is that to be subject to a money pump is to be irrational. The correlation between addiction and money pumps is strong, and because the literature on money pumps is vast, introducing the concept will be worthwhile to clarify the behavioral economist’s general attitude toward this decisional faux pas. In a money pump situation, an agent has inconsistent preferences. For example, the agent may prefer B to A, and C to B. At the same time— inconsistently—the agent may also prefer A to C. More simply, a chooser may

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presently prefer A to B and then flip-flop later by preferring B to A. In either case, if the said agent were to be presented with the right kinds of choices, the agent would be in a remarkably undesirable predicament. Imagine a preference-holder attempting to lose weight and an entrepreneur, who buys and sells food, always buying low and selling high. The dieter has fattening food in the pantry, but desires to buy more healthy cuisine. The entrepreneurial friend offers to buy the fattening food for pennies on the dollar, and to sell healthy food to the dieter at regular price. The entrepreneur sells the food at full price, but is willing, for the sake of kindness, to buy fattening food back at a discount. This gesture is, in itself, not worrisome. The dieter might justifiably view this exchange to be a better deal than buying healthy food and throwing out the fattening food, for they recoup some money for the food the dieter no longer planned to eat. So far, nothing is amiss. The dieter is merely maximizing utility (the dieter presently prefers healthy food to fattening food, and found a way to avoid losing the entire initial investment in the fattening food). However, after beginning to eat healthy food, the dieter may realize that only trans-fatty acids provide a feeling of satiation or fullness. The entrepreneur in this case might expect this preference reversal. Knowing that the entrepreneurial friend has all of the food the dieter enjoys, the dieter might buy back the original fatty food. The entrepreneur only sells food at full price. So, to buy the food that is now desired, our defunct dieter must again pay full price for the same food previously purchased at full-price. Because of inconsistent preferences, our dieter is in the same position as the beginning of this exercise, but with less money. The victim in this model is likely to be a victim in not just one case, but in many. The person in question is in a position to be repeatedly “pumped” for scarce resources. We can obtain the same result in more complex or simpler cases. The only requirement is a set of inconsistent preferences. If I prefer black to blue, red to black, and blue to red, I am in the same money pump situation. Given the first two preferences (black over blue and red over black), logically I should value red most. However, the third preference states that I prefer blue over red. An entrepreneurial “friend” might be in a position to seize upon this inconsistency and exploit it to my disadvantage. Money pump susceptibility is a hallmark sign of irrationality, for it places individuals in a decisional situation in which they end up where they began, but with fewer resources than when they started. Whether the specific scenario involves money or other bearers of value is irrelevant. This type of situation is one doomed to do less (frequently far less) than maximize utility. The similarities between addiction and money-pump scenarios are patent. Addicts might resolutely disavow using their addictive substances today, only to take up their addictions tomorrow, consequently depleting their resources. The following day, they may disavow their drug again, finding themselves in

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the same position they were in two days ago, but with fewer resources. The preference reversals that addicts appear to exhibit strongly resemble the economist’s money pump. The dieter ends up in the same position with less money; the addict ends up in the same position (or worse) with less money and other bearers of value, all because of inconsistent preferences. As a result, the strong presumption is that addiction is irrational. A. Becker and Murphy’s Rational Choice Theory of Addiction Without exception, Rational Choice theories of human behavior take money pump situations to be a serious threat to rationality. The Rational Choice Theorist of addiction is therefore strongly motivated to describe addicts in such a way as to exclude them from the possibility of being deemed victims of money pumps. In the end, the analysis of addicts under Rational Choice models may make addicts appear to be quite different from non-addicts. But that is no theoretical threat, and it is no money pump. So it is with Becker and Murphy’s Rational Choice Addiction (1988). In explaining addiction under a Rational Choice framework, Becker and Murphy propose two fundamental principles that they suggest apply to addiction cases (sometimes called properties of addictive engagement). Ole-Jørgen Skog (1999) succinctly describes Becker and Murphy’s view: Tolerance: The more the consumer has consumed in the past, the less instantaneous welfare (pleasure) the consumer obtains from a given present consumption level. (p. 173) Reinforcement: The increase in instantaneous well-being that persons obtain by increasing present consumption by one unit is larger, the more the persons have consumed in the past. Greater past consumption increases the desire for present consumption. (Ibid.) Becker and Murphy (1988, pp. 681–689) discuss these principles in greater detail, making three assumptions: that instantaneous utility from a certain consumption level depends upon both past and present use; the consumer considers present and future effects of consumption (and all present and future effects), when calculated according to that consumer’s personal discount rate; and the consumer will maximize utility. Given these assumptions, together with the two principles concerning addiction cases (tolerance and reinforcement), we see how the vicious cycle of addiction arises. The consumption of addictive substances has biological and psychological effects. Biologically, the amount a person has consumed in the past to obtain some level of welfare must increase to yield the same gratification. Using economic terms, the greater the consumption capital acquired, the more consumptive capital an agent needs to acquire to arrive at the same level of

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welfare. This is tolerance. Alone, tolerance does not yield addiction. Still, an agent has no good reason to opt in favor of consumption, especially given that a greater cost is required to receive the same benefit as in the past. For example, I may have a taste for French brie. If, however, a trade tariff were to be imposed on imported French brie which has the effect of making the price increase dramatically, then I will likely reduce or eliminate my consumption of it, since for me, having brie is not worth the higher price. Consequently, reinforcement is added as a principle governing addiction. It states that a person’s desire for consumption becomes greater the more the person has acquired a stockpile of consumptive capital. Consuming something pleasurable in the past causes me to desire it more strongly in the present. These two properties are interrelated. Tolerance implies that increasing consumption is needed over time, and reinforcement causes increased usage to be desired over time. A helpful economic term to illustrate the need to add reinforcement to tolerance is “price elasticity,” which refers to the extent to which the raising or lowering of a price for a good has an effect on the demand for that good. Applied to addictions, Becker and Murphy’s two principles hold that addicts’ demand for addictive substances is remarkably “price inelastic.” The increase in price does not reduce their demand for consumption. For example, alcoholics know that the best way to recover from a hangover is to consume an alcoholic drink. When they do this, reinforcement and tolerance have “kicked in.” They desire to do this to avoid the pain of a hangover; their tolerance for alcohol is the cause of their behavior. In the present, drinking may occur for two reasons: to “get up to” some minimal level of utility and to achieve some additional amount of utility. As time goes on, addicts must increase their intake to maintain a level of normalcy, causing a vicious cycle. The “price” that this behavior exacts upon their lives does not diminish the demand for consumption. Becker and Murphy add to these two principles a feature of classical Rational Choice Theory called future discounting. I take it as a holy grail of Rational Choice Theory to discover one consistent rate of discounting held generally by persons. But no such rate has been discovered (and the consensus appears to be that attempting to discover one discount rate is folly). We are left with the messiness of differing rates of discounting. Following Skog’s (1999) methodology, let us consider two cases: one case of high and another of low future discounting. If a person discounts the future highly, then engaging in a series of choices that leads to addiction is rational. A person who starts out abstinent and wishes to consider using alcohol will discount the future enough that the present benefits of using outweigh the future negative consequences of doing so. Because of the heavy discounting rate, when their satisfied preferences are tallied, usage is rationally proscribed.

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However, if a person begins making decisions with a low future discount rate (they value the future highly), the opposite occurs. Such a person will see that “it’s just not worth it,” because the total of preferences satisfied, in the end, are not as great as abstinence. A person who makes this judgment does not begin to use. Presently, we have only discussed either very high levels of discounting or very low levels of discounting. According to classical Rational Choice Theory, either discounter meets the demands of rationality. The person who discounts highly lives by the dictate carpe diem, while the one with low discount rates is willing to make only modest short-term gains for the purpose of potentially garnering larger long-term gains. Both appear to be consistent in that neither makes a choice inconsistent with what they do or will desire. Neither suffers akrasia and neither is shortsighted. What about the intermediate discounter—a discounter somewhere between heavy and light discounting? Skog (1999) claims that such a person faces a cruel twist of fate. Intermediate discounting leads the agent to opt in favor of usage. Yet, once the agent uses to such a point that it realizes that complete abstinence would lead to significant short-term harm (such as painful withdrawal), the principle of reinforcement makes it too late for the agent to change. The agent either must accept that it is myopic, wait for a miracle (such as outside help), or resign to its state. I question the correctness of Skog’s account of the intermediate discounter. Even here, no akrasia is present—only a case of “close call.” The hedonic tabulation narrowly results in opting in favor of consumption. An agent who discounts heavily becomes myopic, perhaps knowingly so, and yet remains apathetic concerning their myopia. One who discounts little is a shrewd planner, never myopic. An intermediate discounter is likely to be unhappily addicted, albeit willing to be addicted. Given that rationality is a function of satisfying preferences, persons at both extremes are rational; only those in between are in peril of being irrational. I suspect that even the intermediate discounter would be rational on Becker and Murphy’s view. Becker and Murphy’s model has met with some disapproval (Skog, 2000, pp. 1309–1314). The primary criticism offered against this view of addiction is that while it may pose a case of bona fide rational addiction, it is not one that is likely to have occurred. Becker and Murphy’s addicts maximize utility, and their agents know everything possible to know about drug usage. Although they have complete knowledge, they opt in favor of addictive behavior because of the steep nature of their discount curves. Obviously, this scenario is not likely to have occurred. Athanasios Orphanides and David Zervos (1995) have attempted to assuage this concern by offering a probabilistic version of the Becker-Murphy model, claiming that addicts willingly gamble: they bet that they will not have to face undesirable consequences of their behavior. But this take on Rational Choice addiction is also inadequate, and for roughly the same reasons cited

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with respect to the Becker-Murphy theory. While we may be able to imagine persons taking informed risks with regards to the consumption of addictive goods, the fact that we can imagine such a case does not imply that risktaking is the source of addictive behavior. The Rational Choice theorist is faced with further difficulties. Becker and Murphy, and Orphanides and Zervos have difficulty explaining the ubiquity of regret among addicts. Let me grant, contrary to what I have argued immediately above, that Rational Choice Theory does offer a consistent and plausible account of the consumption choices of the person who never uses addictive substances and of the person who always uses addictive substances. Becker and Murphy’s explanation as to the difference between these two cases would be that the non-consumer was rational because their decision not to consume was the consistent result of their discount rate. The consumer of addictive substances would also be rational because their choice to consume was also consistent with their future discount rate. Or, following the probabilistic account, the decision not to consume addictive substances would be rational for the agent who has a low degree of risk tolerance. A choice to consume addictive substances would be rational for the agent with a high degree of risk tolerance. But neither of these accounts is able to adequately explain the common predicament of a person who consistently chooses to consume addictive substances, acquires overwhelming inductive evidence as to the likely negative consequences of usage, and regrets this state of affairs. While I cannot claim to offer a complete exposition on the nature of regret, persons who regret past choices appear to wish that they had chosen differently. However, if we rely upon the Rational Choice paradigm and bring Becker and Murphy’s two principles to bear on addiction cases, addict-agents would not regret the past because they would believe that every choice-node at which they consumed addictive substances was a choice-node at which they maximized utility. Notice that the regret agents experience does not resemble simple forms of regret, such as the regret that persons experience when they come to believe that they could have done better, had they chosen differently. In addiction cases, many addicts believe that the problem is not merely a missed opportunity, but a matter of preference-sets that they wish they did not have. The regret blends with self-loathing. It does not help to construe this situation probabilistically. For in the common case of a long-term consumer of addictive substances, who has overwhelming evidence attesting to the likely inability to avoid future disutility, we would have to make the implausible claim that such agents failed to be aware of the evidence of great risk. An additional weakness of the Becker-Murphy theory is their construal of “consumption capital.” The mere fact that an agent has acquired a stockpile of consumptive capital is supposed to explain why an addict is motivated to acquire instantaneous utility. However, as Skog has pointed out, remembering one’s first cigarette provides ample evidence that the motive to continue to

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use may not be purely attributable to the notion of consumption capital. An addict’s first experience with an addictive substance might not have been a good one. Neither can Becker and Murphy explain the ubiquity of relapse. After being removed from the addictive drug for some time, we would expect, because the consumption capital has diminished to zero, that former users would have no rational reason for taking up the addiction again. After all, such persons now have all the inductive evidence they need to be aware of the real consequences of their addictive behavior. Unfortunately, addicts do return to their addictions. A mere discount rate does not adequately explain this phenomenon. While the Becker-Murphy model might demonstrate the rationality of hypothetical addicts, it fails to be proven in known cases. I should be careful, though, not to be resoundingly skeptical. Becker and Murphy’s work on rational addiction serves an important role in the developing behavioral economic literature. Specifically, it presents one thesis concerning what the Rational Choice theorist ought to say about the issue. To that end, whether what the thesis implies is true or false is inconsequential. Instead, being able to handle anomalous cases is a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate concerning the ability of the Rational Choice paradigm. B. Ainslie’s Hyperbolic Discounting Model The work of George Ainslie offers a robust model of addictive behavior, explaining how people acquire addictions, how addicts conduct their addictive lifestyle, and how addicts (might) rid themselves of addiction. Because Ainslie’s view is largely a rejection of key components of Rational Choice addiction (and RCT), elucidating how the Becker and Murphy model differs from Ainslie’s view will be worthwhile. Keep in mind that Ainslie views the Hyperbolic Discounting Model not as an exclusive or total account of addiction, but as an account that resolves the central difficulties of self-defeating behavior. What the Becker-Murphy model presupposes, as does Rational Choice theory, is that choosers are rational. According to this family of theories (RCT and all its applications), to be rational is to have consistent and relatively stable preferences, to deliberate on the basis of those preferences in such a way that opting for the “best” is selected, then to do the best thing. The Rational Choice construal of addiction would reject the notion that we continually reverse our preferences over short periods of time. Symbolically, these presuppositions are demonstrated by appeal to a basic utility function that presupposes a consistent future-discounting rate. Beginning with Paul Samuelson (1937) and continuing today, the Rational Choice theorist uses the following “exponential discounting function”: (1) vi = Aie-kDi

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This equation claims that the value one places on a good is equal to the amount of utility it provides, discounted per delay. While I use this form of the equation, other acceptable ways to state it have been developed. For an historical analysis of twentieth-century decision theory aimed at showing the development of such a discounting function, see Joseph Heath (2003). His version of the equation, framed in the more formal notation is: (2) v(a)=c(a) + ()k-1 uk(a) where v(a) is the value an agent places on a course of action, c(a) is the fundamental choice disposition, ()k-1 is the discounting rate and, thus, ()k-1 uk(a) is the present value one places on a delayed course of action. When used to compare the valuations of two hypothetical goods of different sizes, a graph might look like Figure 1, where the y-axis represents the value a chooser places on a good, and the x-axis represents the distance in time that the chooser is from acquiring that good (we could also describe it as “delay”). The dashed line represents the value attributed to consuming a nonaddictive good, and the solid line represents the value attributed to consuming the addictive substance. Figure 1. Exponential Discount Curves for Two Hypothetical Goods

Furthermore, assume that the intersection of the two axes represents the point at which we first study the agent’s choices (as opposed to the first point in time of the agent’s existence). Finally, assume that the consumptive choice will be made some time just after t2.

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The Becker-Murphy exponential valuation curve (Figure 1), represents stable, unified preferences over time. Because of time discounting, when the agent is far away from the moment of decision, the agent values both goods quite lowly. As time draws closer, the valuation begins to rise steadily. So at t1, the agent already values what, at t2 (the moment of, or just before, the decision), the agent will value then—in this case, the value of consuming the good represented by the solid line more than the good represented by the dashed line. When t2 arrives, based on former preferences (which have been stable throughout time), the agent continues to opt in favor of the solid line’s good, instead of the dashed line’s good. The agent therefore opts for the good represented by the solid line. Agents who valuate according to exponential curves will generally have more stable preferences than those who valuate the same goods hyperbolically. In reference to the simplified example in Figure 1, the agent always has, and always will, value the good represented by the solid line. This “consistency” will not always be the case under exponential valuation functions. Other cases will exist in which the two lines cross even for the most judicious choosers. The point, though, is that the exponential discounter will have generally stable preference-sets (especially, as I will demonstrate, when compared with hyperbolic discounters). The central insight of Ainslie, though, is to propose that agents do not use the valuation function that gives rise to the graph found in Figure 1. Instead, agents use a utility function that gives rise to a different sort of preference structure. He begins with the work of Richard Herrnstein. In what follows, I will recount that history based on Rudy Vuchinich and Nick Heather’s (2003) concise restatement. Richard Herrnstein (1961; 1970) proposed what he called a “matching law.” Drawing on animal experiments, he noted that the responses that animals in his laboratory emitted “matched” the reinforcement available to them (the more the reinforcement, the more the behavior, and vice versa). He summarized his findings in the following equation: (3)

B1 B2

=

FR 1 FR 2

B1 and B2 are the responses allocated to option one and to option two, and FR1 and FR2 represent the reinforcement received from options one and two. What this equation states is that behavior is distributed in direct proportion to the frequency of reinforcement given for that behavior. A. Charles Catania (1963) uses Herrnstein’s insights to analyze the same phenomena, adjusted for amounts of food (not frequency), resulting in the following equation:

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(4)

B1 B2

=

AR 1 AR 2

Catania shows that behavior allocation is directly proportional to the amount of reinforcement given. Shin-Ho Chung and Richard Herrnstein (1967), conducting similar experiments on delay, endorse the following equation: (5)

B1 B2

=

DR 2 DR 1

In this case, the behavior allocated is inversely proportional to the delay of reinforcement. Ainslie’s insight is to combine these findings into a simple generalized equation. Combining (4) and (5) yields: (6)

B1 B2

§ A1 D 2 · × ¸ © A 2 D1 ¹

=¨

Simplified, (6) yields the following utility function: (7) Vi =

Ai Di

However, equation (7) alone is lacking. It would imply: any immediate reinforcer, no matter how small, would be preferred to any delayed reinforcer, no matter how large, and no matter how brief the delay . . . [and it implies that] all individuals will discount delayed reinforcers to the same degree. (Vuchinich and Heather, 2003, p. 11) James E. Mazur (1987) refines (7), yielding: (8) V i =

Ai 1 + kD i

Equation (7) constitutes the Hyperbolic Discounting Model that Ainslie advocates. Again, Vi denotes the value of a reward. Just as before, Ai represents the amount of that reward. The denominator might appear far removed from the denominator of the simple A/D of equation six. In the equation, the Di represents the delay, just as before. However, the k is added to signify the discount rate that the agent happens to apply to that reward, and is

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variable (presumably, from agent-to-agent and from time-to-time). Thus the good is valuated subject to not only its delay and amount, but to its delay and amount subject to the discount rate that the agent happens to have. Finally, the one is placed in the denominator to ensure that the value of a reinforcer never exceeds its amount (for, standardly, the numerical assignment to A will be a number between zero and one). When we graph equation (7) adjusted for two different rewards of different sizes available at different times, we see something quite different from Figure 1. We see hyperbolic shaped lines as shown in Figure 2: Figure 2. Hyperbolic Discounting Curves for Two Hypothetical Goods

Note the dramatic difference we find in Figure 2’s depiction of a simple hyperbolic valuation of two competing goods. Just as with the exponential model, at t1, the agent values the good represented by the solid line over the one represented by the dashed line. Because of the nature of the equation in question, when the moment of choice draws near, “temptation” sets in, causing the valuation of the inferior reward to “spike.” Once t2 has been reached, the valuation of the good represented by the dashed line (in our example, an addictive substance) crosses over the valuation of the good represented by the solid line (in our example, abstinence). Once that valuation curve has been crossed, the agent in question will choose the option that was deemed inferior (and this is likely to continue to be in the case in the future, with respect to similar choices over identical goods). The overall point, then, is that when Ainsliean agents are at t1s, their preference is for the good represented by the solid line, but when the agents are

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at a time beyond t2, their preferences reverse. As the moment of the choice in question draws near a preference, reversal occurs and akrasia ensues. The agent in question chooses the Smaller-Sooner (SS) reward over the LargerLater (LL) reward because at t3 they value it more than the LL reward. That is, they value acquiring the SS now to acquiring the LL later. Considering this is how all choices occur, it appears that we are pervasively irrational. So, for instance, while sitting in the calm of my office, I may truly value not smoking over smoking. However, at some point, should I crave nicotine, I will value smoking more than not smoking. The value I place on smoking, unlike the value I placed on it in the past, has crossed over the valuation line of not smoking. Because we generally do what we prefer (as we saw within the Rational Choice construal of choice making), I choose the thing I prefer: I smoke. This is the trap in which all persons, most notably addicts, find themselves. If the hyperbolic discount function is correct, we all value short-term gains to larger long-term ones, but we also value larger long-term gains to smaller long-term gains. Rationality (which, for Ainslie, is thoroughly externalist in nature) is an achievement. We are in no sense “naturally” rational beings. Although this formulation is meant to be a portrait of all choosers and not just addicts, Ainslie’s applies nearly all of his discussion of this behavioral principle to addicts. Indeed, for Ainslie, radical preference reversal is the defining feature of addiction. In essence, addiction for Ainslie is a “choosing disorder,” and nothing in his work rules out any good from being an addictive good. Choosing hyperbolically instead of exponentially has disastrous effects. Ainslie’s assertion taken seriously would lead us to wonder how human civilization could have lasted as long as it has. People would have chosen short-term urges to be violent, seek revenge, or shed blood over larger later rewards. Ainslie’s only explanation for our unlikely endurance is that we have learned how to mimic exponential curves, regardless how difficult and mysterious such a feat may be. We have done so by implementing the unusual strategy of “grouping” or “bundling” our decisions. While my desire to smoke “just this once” may be stronger than my desire to quit forever, I should learn to view my present choice as precedent setting. I need to view my choosing to smoke today as representative of what I will do on all days on which I must make such a choice. Although I necessarily make the choice at only one choice-node, the considerations I use at that node are ones that include all future choice-nodes that, at least by my lights, suitably resemble the present node. Since Ainslie has preserved some elements of Rational Choice Theory (such as choosing that which I believe will most satisfy my preferences), in such a circumstance, I will choose not to smoke. To choose to smoke now is to choose to smoke on all representative future occasions. Ainslie (1999) rightly points out the deficiencies of using this strategy for overcoming akrasia, where akrasia now is the act of choosing hyperbolically. Those who decide to group rules haphazardly may fall victim to a prob-

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lem that Kantian scholars have known about for some time. A chooser may begin to worship the “grouping rule” to overcome the bane of the hyperbola (ethicists worried about passionless deontology may do well to study Ainslie, a psychiatrist by trade). In Chapter Five, I will return to this problem, and argue that bundling our choices would be desirable, even if done in the manner which Ainslie envisions. Another facet of Ainslie’s view deserves attention at this point. Although he generally refrains from using the terminology, Ainslie’s (1985, p. 133) is a multiple-self view—multiple in the sense that each one person contains a set of diachronically successive selves, each of which replace the previous self. His model sets the stage for any one self with a set of preferences to be at “war” with a future self who will not share those preferences. The future self threatens to make choices that are not in line with what the present self prefers. What the present self must do is undertake a course of action that effectively thwarts the future self’s ability to choose other than as the present self desires. The present self, for example, may take Antabuse (disulfiram) to deprive the future self the pleasure of drinking alcohol. Or, an employee may choose to sign an incriminating letter that would be mailed by a medical facility to the employee’s boss should the next drug test come out positive. What must occur to overcome addiction is that the self who does not value using addictive drugs must determine a way to compete against the self’s future values and choices. Ainslie (2001, p. 91) repeatedly likens this relationship with one’s future self as a “prisoner’s dilemma” relationship. In a standard prisoner’s dilemma, two distinct persons are to make choices independently of each other, but in some predictable order. The choices of each prisoner have a direct impact not only on that prisoner’s accrued utility, but also on the accrued utility of the other prisoner. Depending on the rewards assigned, cooperation eventually may be rewarded above every alternative strategy, but this is not necessarily the case. While I will reserve comment on this construal until Chapter Three, I should here offer some reservation concerning the implementation of the term “prisoner’s dilemma” to describe the relationship one has with one’s self. If we bundle to thwart a future self, then bundling appears to be a method one might employ to ensure this type of relationship does not occur. Bundling is a method where one attempts to deprive a future self of the ability to play the game in the first place by putting in place a set of conditions that makes the future self unable to acquire what it otherwise would have. In other cases, specifically those in which some LL is still more valued, the prisoner’s dilemma analogy might still be apt. One of the single greatest virtues of this model, from a purely scientific standpoint, is its ability to deal with cases of rational inconsistency where RCT either could not, or where RCT strained credulity when it did. David Laibson painstakingly applies the Hyperbolic Discounting Model to a variety

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of well-known anomalies of rational choice. In his Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting (1997), he uses the model to explain irrational preferences for consumers’ liquid and illiquid savings, using extensive data from the Congressional Budget office as evidence that hyperbolic discounting explains. Insurance adjusters, to calculate premiums in markets the nature of which we do not fully understand, have used Laibson’s model (Greg, 2003). It has also been used to explain competition among animal species (Shogren and Settle, 2004), and to aid in problem solving for policy-creation concerning retirement investment (Diamond and Koszegi, 2003). Applications of the Hyperbolic Discounting Model appear to be growing as research on the exact nature of the model continues to unfold. C. The Visceral Account of Addiction The visceral account of addiction, qua account, explicitly removes itself from the discussion of the merits and demerits of Rational Choice Theory. This is not to say that it necessarily removes itself from the discussion, but that it need not rely upon the truth or falsity of any one construal of rational choice to remain an account of addiction. Expounded primarily by Jon Elster and George Lowenstein, the visceral account is probably the least robust of the models discussed in this book (though I include it because it has frequently been discussed when it comes to the issue of moral responsibility). The visceral account makes no attempt to explain how addictions are acquired in the first place (though these theorists will frequently point to a variety of empirical work to fill in lacunae) and seldom concentrates on how addictions are ever cast off. The visceral account is concerned with what is occurring in the head of the addict qua addict. On this account, forces go through the addict’s head, some of which may be irresistible. These forces might be desires or desires that act like emotions. Whatever the forces might be is inconsequential for my purposes here. Lowenstein (1999) conflates the two. What I am concerned with is the picture that emerges from a visceral account, regardless of what construes the visceral forces themselves. Usually, in explaining the view, the visceral theorist enumerates lists or examples of emotions, and then shows how some emotion may have some effect on the agent. Inevitably, at the end of the work, the visceral account theorist will claim that, due to the irresistibility or near-irresistibility of the desire/emotion, the addict either is less than fully free or not free at all. Elster (1999c, pp. 170–172) makes such a claim, holding that agents who are hard-wired to discount hyperbolically are morally like agents who find themselves in the unfortunate situation of becoming aware of a cue to use an addictive substance. Both are victims of forces beyond their control. The hyperbolic discounter cannot choose their discount function, and the recovered alcoholic cannot control the fact that, to use Elster’s example, they happened

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to be in a room in which aromatic whiskey is poured into a glass. Citing the aphorism “‘ought’ implies ‘can,’” Elster declares it pointless to declare either irrational. Presumably, this claim requires that we accept the thesis that a person’s action is not rationally appraisable if that person’s action results from forces beyond the person’s control. I will revisit this contention in Chapter Five, when I argue that we can create a model of hyperbolic discounting which accommodates the rationality and possibility of Ainslie’s proposed “solution” to the irrationalities of hyperbolic discounting. 3. Ainslie’s “Addiction”—An Analysis Ainslie’s theory boasts several successes. It is centered on a testable valuation equation that has yielded at least some favorable empirical results. It not only accommodates the existence of akrasia, but also details the exact mechanism that gives rise to its existence. It is also a general view of all human valuation, and not merely the valuation of addicts. Furthermore, it establishes these successes by appealing to well-established concepts in the field, such as temporal discounting and the matching law. In view of this, we might find it easy to conclude that what Ainslie has given us are the sufficient conditions for addiction—addiction might be, say, behavior that directly results from hyperbolically discounting. This appearance is deceiving. If Ainslie’s theory is a theory of all human (and perhaps animal) valuation, then we would expect to call all persons “addicts,” because all persons “naturally” discount hyperbolically. But to conclude that all persons are addicts is implausible. For given the empirical fact that not all persons use heroin, cocaine, or other addictive substances, were we to hold on to the thesis that all persons are addicts, we would have to invent new sorts of addictions. For example, we would have to claim that while some persons are “addicted” to chemical substances, others are addicted to some types of decision-making processes, or less tangible goods. Such a move resembles more the redefinist fallacy than a compelling response. In this case, addiction appears merely to be redefined as “choosing on the basis of a temporary preference concerning any good whatsoever.” Apparently, a crucial conceptual difference exists between the notion of “yielding to temptation” and “being addicted.” The notion of yielding to temptation appears to involve having done the “wrong” thing at a choicenode, while addiction appears to connote much more than that. Unlike someone who temporarily caves in to temptation, an addict habitually yields to temptation. Addicts have an “object” of addiction, whether it is sex, cocaine, or nicotine, and they revisit that object repeatedly. Finally, unlike the notion of temptation, addiction appears to presuppose the notion of compulsion, sometimes quite contrary to that which we value. Hyperbolic discounting alone gives us none of this.

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In an attempt to preserve the integrity of hyperbolic discounting as an account of addiction, we might be inclined to redefine the above anomalies within the hyperbolic discounting system. The apologist for hyperbolic discounting might claim that “habitually” could be shorthand for “having chosen the inferior short-term good every time in the past.” The advocate of hyperbolic discounting as a theory of addiction might claim that the “object” of addiction is short-term pleasure, and not some specific chemical substance. Adding that the “compulsion” is the feeling an agent has just after the moment when, unexpectedly, the agent’s discount curves cross in a decisional process. But this account is not compelling enough. A far better account can be given. Namely, what the proponent of Ainslie’s view should advocate is that while hyperbolic discounting accurately explains the decisional component of addiction, it is not intended to explain other factors, such as environmental ones, which bear great significance upon the available decisions. What transforms decisions made under the influence of hyperbolic discounting into addictions are visceral influences that create the circumstances under which persons make decisions. In short, hyperbolic discounting plus a small dose of the visceral account yields addiction. Consider again the difference between a long-time smoker’s first cigarette and that same person’s most recent cigarette. The reasons why that person smoked the first cigarette are quite likely different from the reasons why that person continues to smoke. On that first occasion, several factors might have led to the decision to smoke, such as peer pressure, depression, curiosity, or rebellion. Regardless of the initial reasons, the cause for smoking the first time is never the addiction to nicotine. The person continues smoking for years to come because of an addiction to nicotine. Depression or other pressures might also influence the long-time smoker’s decision-making processes, but even on good days with no one else around, the person still smokes. The repeated behavior of having yielded to temptation on several occasions resulted in acquiring an addiction. To transform temptation into addiction, object habituation must be added. The agent in question must become habituated to whatever the object of the agent’s addiction is. If the habituation is chemical, the addiction is likely to have a neurobiological basis. The habituation may be associated with a behavior effective in producing a temporary reward. Whatever the case, the agent in question must acquire a visceral taste for the addictive substance and be aware that the satisfaction of this taste is always an available option. If this proposal is correct, and if we introduce visceral taste into the account, we would expect to find cases of addiction where the object of addictive desire is available, where an agent has acquired a visceral taste for the object, and where choices over which to consume are made hyperbolically. Visceral taste originates the addiction, and hyperbolic discounting promotes it. Therefore, I conclude that Ainslie’s Hyperbolic Discounting Model of hu-

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man valuation ought to be conjoined with a (weak) visceral account to accommodate a full theory of addiction. In summarizing the two points, we can conclude that addiction is a situation in which hyperbolic discounters find themselves in an environment where potential objects of addiction are readily available. We can view the fact of having acquired neurobiological adaptation to a substance as an environmental factor constraining choice—not as a decisional factor. Such adaptation creates the ground rules according to which the choosing occurs at later points in time. 4. Conclusion In this chapter, I examined the theories of addiction from the point-of-view of a behavioral economist, arguing that Ainslie’s was the most successful. I then attempted to rescue it from my accusation that it fails to sufficiently explain addiction by adding a visceral account to it. Having addressed this phenomenon, we will next turn to the issue Ainslie identifies as being most pertinent to his work: “Bundling” as a method to avoid the undesirable consequences of valuating hyperbolically. In Chapter Three, I offer my method for mirroring exponential curves, and explain why this method requires a thorough understanding of the “self” in question, as it occurs in Ainslie’s work.

Three AINSLIEAN SELVES 1. Introduction To offer a potential solution to the apparent psychological impossibility and potential irrationality of bundling, we should first understand George Ainslie’s usage of the term “self,” so that we can demystify one kind of self-deception I will discuss in chapter four. By understanding how that instance of selfdeception is demystified, we will see how “bundling” is possible and rational. Ainslie rarely uses the terms “self” or “multiple self.” He likely intends there to be no robust ontological reality granted to selves across time. Instead, he uses terms such as “successive motivational states,” which is reasonably understood as an “interest” used in the philosophical sense. To better describe the view of self I wish to draw from Ainslie’s work, however, I will use the language of multiple selves as a conceptually useful sort of shorthand. Speaking of multiple selves helps to track the interaction of different motivational states as those states compete against each other in ways that resemble a prisoner’s dilemma. Such talk helps to conceptually clarify the ongoing attempt of a person to thwart or outmaneuver that person’s likely future state. If, as Ainslie repeatedly claims, persons are best understood as agents in an ongoing state of limited warfare with themselves, then the task of keeping track of the sides involved in the war is made easier by assigning them linguistic reality. But I wish to make it abundantly clear that nothing in my treatment of the notion presupposes that metaphysical “reality” be granted to these selves. In philosophical terms, the multiple selves I will discuss are diachronic time-slices of a person that have the interesting feature of possessing different preference-sets over time. I will therefore name these selves in a variety of examples to follow. I will also be contrasting them, such as cases in which one self holds a preference for an addictive good, and another does not. But I will in no sense be committed to any enduring reality of these selves. 2. The Argumentative Strategy The notion of the self as found in the work of Ainslie is clearly multiple. Ainslie rejects the Cartesian enduring ego notion of the self and replaces it with a fragmented and temporally changing one. This presents a serious challenge. An exceedingly large body of research has been written by philosophers on the nature of the self, the nature of the mind, and on issues of self-identity across time. So, should I say too little about the nature of the self as found in

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Ainslie, I face the problem of incomplete or naive statements about the viability of the picture that I will present. However, should I attempt to offer a more robust picture of the self as found in Ainslie’s work, this book could become engulfed in that task. I propose an unhappy compromise: I will begin by offering a list of criteria that any “multiple self” view should meet to be taken seriously by either the philosopher or decision theorist—a list of criteria motivated by the apparent counter-intuitiveness of such a view. Given that list, I will sift through the work of Ainslie on the matter, to see what clues he offers us concerning his view. Then I will synthesize the list, keeping what Ainslie has stated, and then modifying it somewhat. I will finish by identifying those views articulated by philosophers who might offer more philosophical backbone to his view. What will emerge is a clearer view of the self under hyperbolic discounting models, together with my suggestions for improvements on that view. 3. List of Demands: What a Non-Unitary View of the Self Must Explain A multiple self account of persons faces stiff counter intuitions. Therefore, we need to explicate what kind of an entity a multiple self is, and what a multiple self account of the person must explain. By the term multiple self, I mean any view that, whether metaphorically or literally, views a person as containing more than one self either synchronically or diachronically, however robustly those selves may exist. On this view, the “person” is a conceptual box containing selves. No one self is the person (although any one self may believe itself to be), and the person is not composed of just one self. On a multiple self-view, the person is made up of not one, but more than one entity. This plurality of entities need not exist simultaneously; we would call such a set of selves “successive selves.” According to this manner of thinking, if it is true that the person is an “ontological box,” that box contains only one self at a time. That self is often destroyed and replaced by others that are themselves destroyed and replaced by others. The destruction may be caused by a variety of factors. Should the individual selves be defined merely temporally, then the self is destroyed when the time-slice passes. Should the self be defined in light of its preference-set, then the self is destroyed when the preference-set changes. Whatever the case, successive self-views create a series of indexically different entities across time, even though the possibility exists for two indexically distinct entities to resemble each other greatly. According to my definition of the terms, multiple selves can coexist, and successive selves will not. Successive self models are ones in which selves are defined by virtue of time-slices in conjunction with utility functions, while multiple self models are ones in which selves are merely defined in terms of utility functions.

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Before examining Ainslie’s statements, I offer a “list of demands”—a list of topics that any non-unitary self-view should be able to address if it is the case that persons are non-unitary selves: Ontology of the Self: What kind of things are these selves? How many are there? Are these selves as robust as individual persons who happen to all reside within the same flesh, or do they adopt some lesser type of existence? Operations of the Self: What do these selves do? How do they interact? Do they behave as if they were unitary, or as if they were non-unitary selves? What is the proper way to describe their modus operandi? Epistemology of the Self: Do individual selves have private knowledge, or is all knowledge collective? Is memory transitive? How do the ways in which we answer the previous questions have bearing on the concept of self-deception? Self-Governance: Is any one self in control of all selves? Which one? If one self is in control, how does it exert this control? Is a coup possible? Following my terminology, we can that Ainslie has admirably discussed the epistemology of the self, and has discussed in relative depth the issue of the phenomenology of the self. However, he has nowhere discussed the ontology of self, and only in passing the questions I elicit under the heading Self-Governance. 4. Ainslie on the “Self” We will now turn special attention to the comments concerning the nature of the self that Ainslie makes in his publications. Keep in mind that he has never directly addressed all of the topics that I have so far detailed. Therefore, finding definitive or explicit responses to all my “demands” in his writing is difficult. I propose, then, to offer a list (in no particular order) of those attributes of the self found in his writing, which I deem to be especially significant (ubiquitous statements are offered without specific citations): (1) No present self is able retaliate against any past self (Ainslie, 2003, p. 239); (2) The selves taken together require a marketplace or interactive account of rationality; (3) No “ego” stands outside the marketplace model and evaluates it (Ainslie, 2003, pp. 240–244);

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THINKING ABOUT ADDICTION (4) The self is non-unitary is the best explanation for temporary preference shift; (5) Different selves “take turns” at being in control of behavior; (6) Each self is a “complete personality” (Ainslie, 1992a, p. 77); (7) Different selves interact; (8) Different selves engage in limited warfare with each other; (9) “Power bargaining” may be all that unifies the selves (Ainslie, 2001, p. 43); (10) The term “will” denotes the anticipated behavioral result of an inter-temporal bargaining situation (Ainslie, 2003, p. 47); (11) The self is reductionistic (Ibid., p. 67); (12) The notion of a unitary self is “fictitious” (Ainslie, 2001, p. 98); (13) The self is a set of “tacit alliances,” and is not an organ (Ibid., p. 98); and (14) The model of the self is frequently described as “counter-intuitive,” but worth the counter intuition given its explanatory power (passim).

Ainslie uses several terms to denote the self: “successive motivational states,” “successive dispositions to choose,” “populations of reward-seeking processes,” “populations of interests,” and “split ego” (1992a, pp. 57–92; 2001, pp. 29–34, 97). I maintain this list to be exhaustive enough to demonstrate all the main points that Ainslie makes concerning the nature of the self. However, I have not cited every pertinent passage, but those that I have omitted tend to repeat those that I listed. Let us re-examine this list to explore what Ainslie might have meant by his terms. While doing this, I will offer my thoughts and suggestions as well. From this process, I will articulate what I take to be a proper view of the self as found in Ainslie. The first aspect of this self that I wish to treat is that of the sequencing of self-behaviors. Whatever these selves may be, one thing remains true of them: they take turns at the helm (see [5]–[10]). That the selves are successive (or “diachronic”), not synchronous should be obvious to the reader of Ainslie’s works since he has concerned himself greatly with explaining the different “precommitment” devices that an agent may employ to manipulate a future self, knowing that when that future self is “at the helm,” the precommitter will not be present. Ainslie would not be able to explain the phenomenon of precommitment if the selves were simultaneously present. Why would you “lock the door,” or precommit against future theft committed during your absence, if you were always home? Ainslie never comments on whether the selves that succeed one another can also be recurrent selves. Imagine, for example, the case of a person who has two successive selves—S1 and S2. S2 wants to drink; S1 never wants to drink again. We could imagine a drama of relapse, recovery, and relapse unfolding over the course of a year as these two interact. Now let us focus on a

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more limited time frame—say, a single New Year’s Eve. In our story, S1 begins with control in his quiet and manageable living room before going out with friends. S1 resolves not to drink that night, and wonders whether going out with his drinking friends is a wise idea. S1 realizes that the idea to go is unwise and decides that he must not go out with his friends, whereupon S2 takes control, realizing that if S1 is successful, his chances of getting a drink will be slim. So S2 calls up his friends and says, “pick me up at 7:00,” knowing that S1 is polite enough not to tell his friends to go away when they show up. S2 precommits S1 to going out. While in the car on the way to the bash, S1 regains control, and experiences silent regret, only to be over-ridden occasionally by S2 who reminds S1 how embarrassed he will be should he demand to be let off on the side of the road. S1 loses the battle and enters the bar, where S2 takes control for most of the duration of the evening. What we see here is a series of power-gains and losses on the part of two selves: S1 and S2. Should we assume that the self that resolves not to go out with friends is the same self as the one that experiences regret while in the car with those friends? For that matter, should we assume that the self that precommits against the non-drinking S1 is the same as the self that drinks that night? I suspect that Ainslie would agree that they are the same selves. On our list, we saw Ainslie explaining these selves as “complete personalities” (6). We are reasonable to assume that by “personality,” he presupposes some sort of entity that persists throughout time. If so, then on Ainslie’s view, two and only two selves exist in our story. But they are recurring selves. This idea runs along the same lines as the familiar distinction between qualitative and numeric identity. No doubt, S1 (or S2) in my story is qualitatively identical throughout. What I have been asking is whether, at the different time-slices in my story, the selves that appear to be the same are numerically identical. I assume that they are, and accept this to be a brute fact about Ainslie’s view. Following this intuition, I assume that, when selves have control, lose it, and then regain it, although the self in question is not the only self that exists, the self that loses control is the same one that regains it. Selves in Ainslie’s view persist through time, but through time, gain and lose control. “Losing control” is shorthand for “control being taken by another self whose preferences differ from the self that previously had control.” In the language of the philosophy of mind, we might call Ainslie’s view “preference-set essentialism.” One self is identical to another if every preference had by the one is also had by the other. Imagine two chronologically distinct selves—S3 and S4. Imagine further that S3 and S4 share exactly the same preferences. According to preference-set essentialism, S3 is S4. Just how closely the preference-set must match-up over time in order to be identical is a serious concern. While it may be useful to assume that a self that appears, disappears, and reappears over the course of a day is the same self, it might not be useful to

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think this way over the span of decades. For example, to assert that someone who gave up drinking in 1985 and continues abstinence today is the same person now as they were in 1985 may be plausible. Would we want to say, in Ainsliean terms, that the present non-drinker is numerically identical to the 1985 non-drinker? Although the two share the same attribute of not drinking, they may differ radically in many other respects. So the assertion that selves last throughout the lifetime of a person may be false. It appears that Ainslie is bound to deny the transitivity of identity over long periods of time. Putting that point aside, if my interpretation is correct, then a tension arises. The first point on my list states that no present self may retaliate against a past self. Strictly speaking, this is not true. For while no present self can undo the past, what the present self can do is learn from the past behavior of another self, and devise new and more effective ways of defeating that same undesirable behavior on the part of that self. The present self cannot harm a past self, but it can thwart that past self should it re-emerge. Retaliation must be possible. Viewing the relationship between a present and a past self in this way sheds light on the ways in which selves operate, potentially addressing some of the issues I raised earlier. A. Operations of the Self Ainslie has told us that selves succeed each other, and that some self is always in control. What selves do while on center stage is clear; they take in all of the information they have before them, observe what past selves have done both to and for them, and figure out how to do what they want now, as well as ensure, how they will get what they want when they are gone. What these selves do while they are in the background is something of a mystery. All that Ainslie appears to say regarding what might cause a self to gain or lose control is that the mere passage of time causes the shift (2001, chap. 1–3). He would have us understand the overthrow of power in the following manner: when hyperbolic discounting is the rule, and when two rewards are a long way off, we value the better long-term reward a bit more than the inferior short-term reward. So, for example, presently when I think about whether to use cocaine on 29 December 2030, I will likely value not using on that far off date. But when 29 December 2030 comes around, I might experience preference reversal due to the nearness in time and my proximity to the choice-node. But this example is worrisome. Right now the Pope may have immediate access to heroin, but I would wager that he will not inject himself with it, even if, right now, he is aware of that the immediacy of that possible action. What could be different with regard to the Pope and the cocaine addict in the previous paragraph? The mechanism of hyperbolic discounting must be supplemented somehow, in the manner in which I augmented it in the previous chapter when defining addiction: by appeal to visceral factors. Doing this will help to explain why the Pope is not a cocaine addict, and why other

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persons are addicts. The Pope has not engaged in a series of choices that will likely make him viscerally susceptible to the tempting pull of a heroin injection. But heroin addicts have engaged in just such a series of choices. Perhaps having engaged in a series of these kinds of choices creates neurobiological changes such as “adaptation” which later serve to produce motivational force with regard to some obtainable goods (such as heroin). Perhaps having engaged in those kinds of decisions in the past helps to establish other kinds of mechanisms that create visceral taste or craving. But whatever the mechanism and link, the difference between the Pope and a heroin addict, with regard to heroin, is that the Pope lacks the visceral “tug” for heroin that the heroin addict does. True, the Pope may have visceral taste for other indulgences, and with respect to those goods, he will evaluate hyperbolically. But his lack of visceral taste for heroin explains why hyperbolic discounting for heroin does not apply in his case. My insistence that hyperbolic discounting must be augmented with a measure of a visceral account also appears to have bearing on the notion of the self. I argue that some selves will respond to visceral influences in ways that other selves will not. Creating a habituated response to a visceral influence is an effective means of creating a unique personality, a self. What causes the emergence of a self is the introduction of some visceral influence that tugs at the faculties of a dormant self, rousing it to a state of power at least equal to that possessed by the self that happens to be in control at the moment. If the power that the visceral tug induces in the dormant self is far greater than the power possessed by the self that was in control prior to the introduction of the said visceral influence, then preference reversal occurs immediately. If the power introduced is equal to the power possessed by the other self that happens to be in control, then intrapersonal warfare results, the results of which are unknown. Importantly, merely because the result is not known does not mean that the result is not certain. While not using the term, Ainslie accounts for freedom compatibilistically (2001, pp. 129–134; 2003, pp. 843–845). But while traditional compatibilism claims that an agent is free if the agent happens to do what the agent wants to do, Ainslie’s claim is that agents are free if they fail to know what they will do in the future: agents are free if they fail to know what the result will be from some particular session of intratemporal bargaining. To that end, Ainslie’s account of human freedom is remarkably similar to Tomis Kapitan’s (1986). B. Ontology of the Self: Identity and Change Note the implications here for the ontology of the self. If I am correct, then some selves coming into existence is likely. I believe that a simple thought experiment might bear this out. Imagine a drug called “Necrotica.” Necrotica causes extreme euphoria, lasts for a day in its usual dosage, and is severely

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chemically addictive. Users of it acquire an addiction after taking it one time, and rarely, if ever, abandon that addiction. For those who are addicted to it, only Necrotica will do, no other drug will quell the visceral craving for it. Necrotica addicts seek out that drug and only that drug. Imagine also that no one on our planet has yet discovered Necrotica. Do Necrotica addicts still exist? I would argue that they do not. No one has ever taken the drug, no one knows to use it to satisfy their addictive cravings, and most likely, no one has addictive cravings for it. We do know this though: if we were to discover Necrotica, we would suddenly have many Necrotica addicts who, when their addict selves are in control, will seek out Necrotica. That is, if the drug were to become available, we would have a plethora of new addicts that did not exist before. We do not need to resort to esoteric examples to show that this phenomenon is ubiquitous, for our actual world offers plenty of real examples. For instance, a time existed during the history of humankind before the invention or discovery of alcoholic beverages. But if it is true that addicts of alcohol now exist, then, translating this fact into Ainsliean terms, it is now true that there exist selves who have a preference for alcohol. If, following Ainslie, a self is but a set of preferences with a utility function, then this would be a case of the creation of a self since we know that prior to the invention of alcohol, there could not have existed any self with a preference for it. This pattern holds true with many other “goods” such as compulsive Internet usage, addiction to hybrid designer drugs, preferences for consumer fads, and the entire fashion industry. This thought experiment illustrates that addictions can be created and that new selves can come into existence. When applied to the language of multiple selves, this must mean that selves must be created. For if we were to deny this, and then we must say that some newborns are born with cocaine addicted selves. But saying this appears merely to be theory-preserving at best and inflammatory at worst. Also, it shows that mere nearness in time and proximity to the choice-moment does not, in itself, explain why one might acquiesce to the temptation. When Necrotica appears for the first time, whether to an entire world or just to one person within the world, nearness does not explain why the first person took it. I would warn the reader not to assume that the “rational” self is the “innate” or “standard” one: that self may have been created too. I also leave it open whether an addict self is created ex nihilo or is created by transforming some other self. Next, we confront the problem of the ontology of the self. In so doing, we must recall that Ainslie has declared that the ontology of a unitary self is a “fiction” (point number twelve). Therefore, much of the traditional philosophical apparatus surrounding ontology is moot. For example, in Ainslie’s system, there is no legitimate way to study the existence and persistence of an enduring Cartesian substance.

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Perhaps we are merely studying the phenomenal states within a person who is composed of multiple successive dispositions. Perhaps we are studying what some philosophers call “supervenient properties” in the way that a corporation might supervene on all of the things that make up a corporation (such as persons, equipment and job duties). Whatever the case, my interpretation will generally be phenomenal. By studying the phenomenal relationships between successive dispositions to choose, we are thereby studying the ontology of the self. By taking this approach, I assume that I face the same burden that Ainslie faces. My phenomenal explanation will only be compelling if it “pays off”; if it satisfactorily resolves difficult and perplexing issues that the standard view does not, all the while accommodating the phenomena that the standard view does explain. I therefore assert that the model of the self that I will set up does accomplish this. On Ainslie’s Hyperbolic Discounting Model, the term “self,” as in “myself,” or as implied in words such as “I” or “me,” is mere language that when used properly, denotes a population of personalities. These personalities have capacities and abilities. They can deliberate, remember, and feel. If, by the term “person,” we mean “the thing that, together with my body, is me,” then these individual selves are not complete persons. As to how many selves are within any one person, I remain agnostic. Based on what I have said so far, the answer must either be “no fewer than two” or “very many.” Without at least two, no willpower could exist, but if selves do not last throughout the duration of a life, then many more than just two must exist. C. Epistemology of the Self In light of these considerations, we should now return to the epistemology of self questions raised earlier. I will shelve the issue of self-deception for the present, for that topic deserves its own chapter, and focus for now on the question of whether memory across selves is transitive. Given the radically reductive nature of the self that I am examining in this chapter, we might wonder what unifies these selves. Ainslie claims that these successive selves are unified in virtue of their engaging in ongoing warfare, power plays and repeated prisoner’s dilemmas. On the one hand, it is obviously true that warfare, power-plays and prisoner’s dilemma iterations create a relationship between the two parties that happen to be engaged in them. Where a relationship exists, there exists a type of unity. But on the other hand, it is equally obvious that when we use the word “relationship” to describe their connection with each other, we by no means intend the term to connote any sort of emotional attachment, trust or affinity. Rather, we use the term merely because the two competing motivational states happen to share a

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property in common, such as the property of being at war with each other. While it may be odd, warfare is, if only in a linguistic sense, a unifying factor. The warfare and game-theoretic examples offered repeatedly by Ainslie, however, do not exhaust all the aspects that unify us. Derek Parfit’s (1986) account of what it is that unifies a person over time, for example, lists many other factors that would rightly constitute unifying relationships among selves, but without resorting to a monolithic, non-divided model of the self. These might include character connections, connections of beliefs, desires, and goals. However, I will focus on a different sort of connection between these selves. These selves are also connected by their having relatively similar memories about their past. The obviousness of this claim can be clarified by thinking about uses and misuses of the term “memory.” For example, it appears to be wholly wrong for me to claim that I remember what was going through the mind of a reader of this book at some time in the past. For one, having such a memory would presuppose a mental power that has heretofore we have not noticed in any human being. If, however, I were to arrive at some belief about what was going through my reader’s mind, at best it would be a guess or an approximation, not a memory. For I lack the relevant psychological connection to the mind of the reader that a person would require to recall the memories of others. I can, however, access memories of events that I take myself to have experienced in the past. Many of these might be singularly uninteresting. But others would be quite revealing given the discussion of this book. For example, I can remember what was going through my mind at some moment in the past when I was contemplating giving in to temptation. For example, I have a memory of seriously contemplating buying a new car while I was also a fulltime graduate student with no reasonable way to pay for it. I can remember thinking about all of the problems that a new car would solve, such as cutting down on auto mechanic bills, increasing fuel efficiency, and resolving a host of aesthetic offenses committed by what was then my current mode of transportation. Luckily, I did not give in to that temptation. It was only fleeting. But what strikes me as being of interest with regard to this memory is not so much what I was thinking as I was experiencing the temptation, as what I was not thinking. I was not thinking about how I would pay for the car. Now, let us say that another self was in control at that moment I wanted to buy the car. If this other self were in control at that time, and if that self is not presently in control as I write these words, then it must be the case that memory is transitive across selves. Memory “unifies” us in the way that ongoing warfare unifies us; it creates a relationship between me now, and me in the past. I submit that conceptualizing memory as a unifying factor among selves is crucial, especially when it comes to understanding the irrationalities with which the Hyperbolic Discounting Model of valuation is concerned. When I address self-deception in the next chapter, I will cover the topic of what my

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present self does with memories transferred from past selves and how what a person does with those memories may lead to self-deception. But for now, I will leave the discussion there, and move on to the next item in my list of demands, content with what is now the mere observation that memory unifies. D. Self-Governance The last of my criteria, self-governance, examines whether any one self is in control of all selves. If all there is about me is that I am a population and if some of the populace are reasonable and some not, then it would be desirable to have a method of deciphering between the two. For then, perhaps, I would be able to justify the giving of normative weight to one self, and not to the other. In the language I have used throughout this section, I have tacitly done just that—I have juxtaposed the “addict self” with the “reasonable self.” The addict self is the one that always chooses the inferior short-term gain and does so by showing up at the opportune time. Because the reasonable self always chooses the better long-term gain, if it had control more often, then life would be better for the addict. This juxtaposition supposes that one self is right and the other is wrong. Even the terms that I have chosen to describe them (“reasonable self”) presupposes that I place normative priority upon one of them and not the other. I have called the self upon which I place normative priority the “reasonable” self because I believe it will make things better for me. Am I entitled to think this way? Am I entitled to view one self as being normatively superior, in the right, or a legitimate governor of sorts? I surely want to, but Ainslie disagrees. Exploring what Ainslie means by “ego” will be worthwhile. Ainslie discusses the concept in an exchange with Olav Gjelsvik. Gjelsvik (2003) argues that an “ego outside the marketplace” is needed to evaluate rationality: “marketplace rationality” alone will not suffice; it is incapable of telling which of the populace is in the right and which is in the wrong. Marketplace rationality can merely identify the winners and losers. Ainslie disagrees that this constitutes a serious objection to his contention that there exists no ego outside the marketplace. In response states, (1) that in his view, reason is a slave to the passions; (2) that Gjelsvik confuses value-based facts with experiences seen at a distance; and (3) he refers the reader to his Breakdown of Will (2001, pp. 129–134; expanded explanation, 2003, pp. 239–240). Unfortunately, (3) is a dead end because Ainslie (2001, pp. 129–134) is concerned with defending the notion that the hyperbolic mechanism accommodates the abundance of behavioral evidence the we have, and is not at all directed at whether or not we need one self to be normatively superior. It is hard to see how (1) and (2) respond to the problem. But in an effort to interpret him charitably, we might interpret (1) and (2) as constituting a response to

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the objection in the following manner: Ainslie’s ontology of the self is nothing other than the phenomenon of different competing interests. To have an outside arbitrator judging the process would be to require a self that is itself not a part of intrapersonal bargaining, but which is aware of the facts of the bargaining situation. But no self fails to be a member of the intrapersonal bargaining situation while simultaneously knowing the facts of the situation. Therefore, the demand for an outside “referee” self is not reasonable. Stated positively, Ainslie might be saying that any judgment of normative priority of any self’s preferences could only come from a self with access to the facts of the bargaining situation. But any self with access to those facts will be one of the selves in the collection that makes up the person. Therefore, any normative weight ascribed to any self will be the reflection of just one self’s preferences, and will by no means be a reflection of any objective fact of the matter. I find Ainslie’s position on this to be highly undesirable. I am inclined to take Gjelsvik’s side. Recall that my primary thesis holds that “bundling” is not only possible, but also a rational process. If we are to take Ainslie’s comments seriously, then our problems have doubled. Not only must we show that bundling is possible and rational, but also we must show why we would hope for the reasonable self to bundle, but not the addict self. The addict self, after all, has every reason to bundle in the following way: I will always act in such a way as to use substances as much as possible on every day in which I am to choose. What can Ainslie say to rule out this kind of bundling? If all there is to a self is limited warfare, with willpower being mere victory, how could we rationally support our belief as spectators about this war that one side is fighting on the side of justice, while the other not? So far, he can say nothing. I tentatively conclude that we must abandon Ainslie’s demands for “non governance,” and find a way to justify the authority of the governor. But I arrive at this tentative conclusion knowing that I owe an explanation. That explanation will be developed later in chapter five, section four. 5. Philosophical and Religious Views that Echo Ainslie’s View of Self So far, we have set up a list of demands that a non-unitary view of the self must meet and found that Ainslie’s view meets many of them (epistemological, phenomenological), explains away the need for some (ontological), and fails to accommodate governance. I am also keenly aware that I have promised the reader to take up some further issues in the following chapters. I shelved the epistemological demand for explaining self-deception. Closely behind, I claimed that memory would play a key role in analyzing self-deception. I will address those issues in the next chapter. I also delayed final judgment on the issue of self-governance, to which I will return in Chapter Five, where I will lay out my plan for explaining the possibility and rationality for bundling.

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For now, let us take a step back and tie up another loose end that I brought up earlier. I have promised to relate this information on Ainslie to other work done in philosophy, especially with regard to the notion of personal identity. So let us now turn our attention to some philosophical and religious views that appear to echo Ainslie’s view of the self. As early as antiquity, philosophers have addressed the notion of multiple selves. Plato’s Republic, especially Book IV, presents a model of self that we lovingly dub the “tripartite self/soul.” According to this view, each soul has three components: the reason, the spirited, and the appetites. According to Plato, none of these aspects of the soul should ever be utterly thwarted. Instead, they should all be permitted to flourish as long as reason is the governor of them all. The Platonic view has been expounded upon at much greater length than this book can accommodate. But Plato appears to care a great deal about the majority of the questions I have posed. After all, Plato views the City as “man writ large.” The ideal city will be a mirror image of the fully just person who has reason in control, exercises the spirited, as well as the appetitive aspects of this soul. Using the terminology from my list of demands, the question of “self-governance” is of central importance to Plato, and to it he has a definitive answer—the self is to be governed by reason, just as is the case with the city. So if we are to adopt Ainslie’s insistence that no overriding ego exists, Plato is no friend of his. We therefore ought to view Ainslie’s work as deeply anti-Platonic when it comes to the constitution of human persons. Augustine of Hippo, when he declares, “Oh God, make me chaste . . . but not yet,” at once confesses a double-life and echoes deeply Christian sentiments characteristic of the Christian consciousness for three and a half centuries. The language of multiple selves pervades the New Testament. Consider the following passage, in which the Apostle Paul describes his struggles to compete effectively against the interests of other selves whose discount functions differ dramatically: I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans: 7, NRSV)

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I will not make the error of claiming the unnecessarily relationship between the thought process of the theologian Paul and the psychiatrist George Ainslie. However, it does appear highly interesting that the Apostle Paul seemed to view persons as entities with no fewer than two competing natures. To claim that this fact is what calls for the act of salvation is not much of a stretch. The writings of Paul are littered with reference to the interaction of these two natures, always (as is the case with the passage cited above) making sure to mention the proper cure for overcoming this corrupted nature. In another vein, one might do well to compare Ainslie’s view with the traditional Buddhist view. In a brilliantly written article, Serge-Christophe Kolm (1987) casts a Buddhist view on the language of the twentieth-century philosopher of language and behavioral economist. His contention is that the Buddhist views the “self” as a linguistic invention, with no reality. Such a view would not accommodate Ainslie’s diachronic time-slice selves. 6. Further Avenues Should more work be done on the issue of Ainsliean selves, and be done to conform with what the current philosophical establishment considers to be of interest in this area of research, it would likely be best to probe the ways in which Ainslie’s selves are consistent with recent developments in personal identity over time. But to suggest how this should work out would be to steer this book in an altogether different direction than that which I intend.

Four SELF-DECEPTION 1. Introduction In the previous chapter, I outlined what I understand to be the multiple selfview that George Ainslie should adopt, taking exception to, but not commenting upon, his “no global ego” position. In this chapter, I will use my amended version of the multiple self-view to shed light on the phenomenon of selfdeception. The purpose of my doing so is to set up the next chapter in which I use this model of self-deception to motivate, descriptively and prescriptively, a potential solution to the bundling problem, rendering bundling rational, possible and desirable. My approach will be as follows: I begin by displaying some approaches to grappling with self-deception, one of which privies itself to contradictions (Davidson, 1985). Another demystifies the phenomena utterly (Mele, 1997; 2001). Then I will present my approach, which is motivated by my discussion in Chapter Two of Ainslie’s notion of the self—one that demystifies selfdeception based on his mystifying nature of the self. The result will be a model that in some respects resembles Donald Davidson’s, with the exception that no one self needs to hold a contradiction (Davidson appears to require this, as I will address shortly). This model will set the stage for bundling and the resolution of the “governance problem” I explained in Chapter Two. 2. Some Approaches to Accounting for Self-Deception As we saw in the previous chapter, Ainslie holds an unusual view of the constitution of the self. It cannot be stressed highly enough that we must keep in mind that Ainslie views this unusual psychological makeup as basic to the human condition. For Ainslie, this view is not an artificial philosophical affectation, but a brute fact about who we are. If we assume this stance, we will understand that the question to ask is not “How is it that multiple selves are possible,” but “Why would we ever believe in a unitary self-view in the first place?” In this chapter, I will explore the viability of the following response: we believe in a unitary self because we have been self-deceived. By now many philosophers are aware of the remarkably unusual moves that some of their colleagues have been willing to make when accounting for self-deception. A survey of the literature in the field will be most helpful before we continue. First, there is an intentionalist/contradictory approach to the solution, which posits a self that knows what is true, and then successfully endeavors

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to simultaneously believe its negation. Based upon the presupposition of a unitary self, expositors of self-deception makes themselves privy to a thoroughly Kantian principle about lying and truth telling. This principle, derived from Immanuel Kant’s (1993) famous “On the Alleged Right to Lie from Philanthropic Concerns,” states that to lie we must first know the truth. Imagine an alcoholic who believes that the following proposition is true: P: I am an alcoholic To deceive oneself, the alcoholic must lie according to Kantian’s definition of the term “lie”: an intentional misrepresentation of the truth to another person (ibid.). Presumably, this definition presupposes the ability of the other person to believe the lie. The cogitoesque expositor of self-deception is committed to saying of the same person who knows P that the person also believes -P. Using the law of addition, the agent in question appears to believe (P and -P). To decipher whether believing (P and -P) is at all possible, much less rational, under a unitary self, would merit a completely different book. I take the uneasiness that many scholars display in their writings concerning such views to be indicative of the status quo on this issue. Although I am sympathetic to the view that a non-unitary self is deeply counterintuitive, I view the prospects of maintaining a contradiction to be rational and to be worse. One potential avenue is available for unitary-self proponents to explore should they attempt to maintain the possibility of such a belief. Graham Priest has explored this avenue across several publications. Although controversial, in his In Contradiction (1988), he defended a position he calls dialethism, which is Greek for “two truths” (di and altheiai). His view is that some statement can be simultaneously a contradiction and a truth. In In Contradiction, he privies himself to some of the most famous paradoxes in logic (such as the liar’s paradox and the preface paradox), and argues that those paradoxes constitute true statements. To be fair, Priest has never claimed that we should extend the principle of dialethism to all contradictory statements. He has only directed his attention toward those that are relatively well known and relatively problematic for logicians. Unfortunately, he has not told us how to tell one from the other (the contradictions that are true, and those that are not). If his thesis stands under scrutiny, we might have the first step toward understanding how the contradictory requirement might be met. For if people are able to believe the contradictions that happen to be true, those contradictions could then be used in basic inferences salva veritate, yielding “logic” of irrationality. Provided that we are able to work out these problems, then perhaps Priest’s work could be used to explain self-deception of the variety with which I am concerned, assuaging the concerns of those who have revolted from “traditional” views of self-deception. But I will not attempt to undertake that task here.

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A. Davidson on Self-Deception When faced with the difficulty in showing how one person could believe a contradiction, many have proposed “dividing out” the person, stating that a person believes P in one way, and -P in a different way (or “time” or “mode”). Davidson’s famous paper provides a case in point of this approach. Davidson has us consider the following propositions: (1) D believes that he is bald (2) D believes that he is not bald (3) D believes that (he is bald and he is not bald) (4) D does not believe that he is bald (1985, p. 79) Davidson attempts to show that believing (1) and (2) is possible, that belief in (2) is caused by belief in (1), but at the same time, while believing (1) and (2), a person can also fail to believe (3) and (4), even though (3) and (4) seem to fall out of (1) and (2) quite easily. Consider the following case, which is consistent with Davidson’s depiction. Joan, a parent of a sixteen-year old girl, has every confidence that her daughter is a fine, upright, and decent law-abiding human being. After all, her daughter has assured her that she is. One day, when her daughter does not get up from bed at her usual time, she goes to her room, knocks on the door, enters, and finds her daughter sprawled out on the bed with beer cans strewn about the room. The odor of alcohol is in the air, and there are fruit flies hovering about. Her daughter is snoring deeply. In that moment, Joan has every reason to believe that her daughter is drunk and passed-out. But the thought that her daughter would do such a thing is immensely painful to her. She does not want to believe that it is true. Because Joan, like the rest of us, prefers to avoid pain, and because believing that her daughter has been drinking is painful, Joan prefers to believe that her daughter has not been drinking. What the mother does at this point is anyone’s guess. She may conjure up reasons to believe that her daughter was home all night. She might speculate that her daughter had been out all night rounding-up her drunken friends. Then, after confiscating their alcohol so that none of the minors would drink, the daughter drove them all home. As a result of her extraordinary effort of maintaining the probity of her friends, she fell into a deep slumber. Better yet, in disbelief, the mother might convince herself that the person she sees in the bed is an imposter. It does not matter how Joan responds. The point is that she has acquired some kind of belief to the effect that her daughter has not been drinking alcohol. Her belief may be very elaborate, such as the belief that her daughter is tired after having saved her friends from self-destructive alcohol abuse. Using this example, her belief that her daughter has been out all night helping her friends is a belief that was caused by the prior belief that her daughter had

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been drinking. After all, had her daughter arrived at breakfast on time, Joan would never have come to believe that her daughter was out all night helping her friends. She has more reason to believe that her daughter had been drinking than not, and precisely because of this, endeavors to believe that her daughter has not been drinking. Self-deception, for Davidson, is occurrent—the self-deceived must believe that they have every reason to believe a proposition, while simultaneously endeavoring to believe its negation. Davidson claims this happens by partitioning off the two beliefs from each other so that the inference rule of addition is never applied. Furthermore, he suggests that this is the irrationality of self-deception–not that two (potentially) inconsistent beliefs are held, but that the believer intentionally partitions them off from each other and never conjoins them. B. Mele on Self-Deception Davidson’s attempt to describe self-deception leaves much to be explained. How is it that a person “partitions off” beliefs? Does the believer believe both in the same way, or with the same propositional attitude? While Davidson goes a long way toward demystifying self-deception, mysteries remain. Alfred R. Mele’s (1997; 2001) account of self-deception, on the other hand, is intent upon removing all the mysteries from the phenomena of self-deception. To use his term, he desires to remove the “mental exotica” from his account. Explicitly taking aim at Davidson, Mele contends that any work that construes self-deception as being roughly analogous to its interpersonal relative is misguided. He also offers what he calls a “deflationary” account of this phenomenon in its stead. A non-deflationary account (unlike Mele’s) presupposes the truth of at least one of the following two propositions: (1) By definition, person A deceives person B (where B may or may not be the same person as A) into believing that p only if A knows, or at least believes truly, that ~p (that p is false) and causes B to believe that p. (2) By definition, deceiving is an intentional activity: nonintentional deceiving is conceptually impossible. (Mele, 2001, p. 6) Mele attempts to undermine both of these two presuppositions by casting self-deception as a species of motivated biased belief. The compelling desire to have something be true may motivate us to acquire the belief that it is true, regardless of whether we have good reason to believe that it is true. The dichotomy between motivated and unmotivated bias is crucial. On the “motivated” side, Mele (1997; 2001) uses an experiment on exposure to information to demonstrate his point. Female students were given a bogus report on the effects of caffeine usage on their long-term health. The

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report forcefully claimed catastrophic ills that befall the chronic imbiber. Then the students were asked to report the degree to which they were convinced. Female students who drank caffeine regularly were less likely to accept the conclusions more so than the non-caffeine users. Mele points out that the students who were caffeine users and did not accept the conclusions were most likely motivated not to accept the conclusions. Perhaps they scrutinized the evidence hypercritically, or perhaps they intentionally glanced over the article without paying much attention. Whatever the scenario, they did so with motivation, and thereby held a biased belief. This is not to say that all biased beliefs must also be motivated. It appears to be the case that humans have a tendency to take as weightier those observations that confirm our beliefs instead of those that disconfirm them. Also, human beings apparently actively search for causal explanations. This is to say that, in Mele’s sense, our biased beliefs may or may not be motivated, but the self-deceptive biased beliefs are. With this distinction in mind, Mele has a set of jointly sufficient conditions for self-deception: (1) The belief that p which S acquires is false. (2) S treats data relevant, or at least seemingly relevant, to the truthvalue of p in a motivationally biased way. (3) This biased treatment is a nondeviant cause of S’s acquiring the belief that p. (4) The body of data possessed by S at the time provides greater warrant for -p than for p. (1997, p. 95) Note that on Mele’s view, an agent does not need to truly believe that -p while at the same time falsely believe that p. Contrary to Davidson’s account, the agent does not need to hold two beliefs that would, under the law of addition, entail a contradiction. The agent does not have to mysteriously “parcel out” or “compartmentalize” beliefs. All that a person must do in order to be self-deceived is acquire a false belief in a motivationally biased way. Provided that we acquire a belief in such a way, we have met the sufficient conditions for self-deception. Mele concludes that he has undermined the two presuppositions of selfdeception that are ubiquitous in the literature. On the one hand, he has dispensed with the requirement that the self-deceived believe contradictions. The process of motivationally biased belief formation, by its design, prevents one of the two statements from being believed. The second presupposition is also undermined because we do not need to construe this activity as intentional, if by “intentional” we mean “with full understanding that we are doing so.” For the ways in which we acquire biased beliefs seem to slip past our awareness. This type of self-deception is the “garden variety” type according to Mele. It

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accounts for the majority of cases of self-deception and only fails in “deviant” or “exceptional” cases. To that end, Mele concludes: I conclude with a challenge for readers inclined to think that there are cases of self-deception that fit the strict interpersonal model—cases in which the self-deceiver simultaneously believes that p and believes that -p. The challenge is simply stated: provide convincing evidence of the existence of such self-deception. The most influential empirical work on the topic has not met the challenge, as I have shown. Perhaps some readers can do better. However, if I am right, such cases will be exceptional instances of self-deception—not the norm. (1997, p. 101) I concede to Mele on this point. But I should also forewarn that the model of self-deception I will propose will not be entirely devoid of the facets of Davidson’s proposal with which Mele appears to take exception. First, let me recap the valuable information we can take from Davidson and Mele, then go on to propose my model. 3. A Summary of These Approaches Davidson has offered a way to understand self-deception that has the benefits and drawbacks of assuming an agent who possesses two beliefs, the propositional content of which are mutually contradictory. This is a benefit because it mirrors, as Mele points out, the paradigm cases of interpersonal deception with which we are all intimately familiar. It is problematic, though, not so much because it assumes the actuality of some dubious psychological state, but because Davidson fails to tell us how holding two such beliefs by never putting them together to form of a contradiction is possible. Mele, on the other hand, has not only shown us how self-deception may require no holding of a contradiction, but has even removed the “exotica” of the existence of two beliefs whose propositional content are mutually contradictory. If Mele is correct, that his set of conditions is sufficient for selfdeception, and if he is correct in claiming that he thereby accounts for the vast majority of cases of self-deception (the “garden varieties”), then he has made a significant advance over the view of Davidson. Note that both of these works assume the notion of a unitary self that deceives. Even Davidson speaks of one individual who is partitioned. I am not working with such a view. In what follows, I hope to transform facets of both models into a new model of self-deception tailored for Ainsliean selves.

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4. Ainsliean Self-Deception: A Proposal If it is true that the interpersonal model of self-deception is the easiest to use in explaining deception, and if a non-unitary conception of the self is the correct one, then I should be able to claim right away, following Davidson, that self-deception is just one of my selves deceiving another. However, based on the non-unitary conception of the self I laid out in Chapter Two, I am unable to do this in a straightforward way. I would be able to do this if I had not claimed that memory is transitive. Because memory is transitive, it follows that deception on the intrapersonal level is a different species than self-deception on the interpersonal level. For even if my present self believes falsely something that a previous self transferred to me, I should still have access to the memory of that past self’s intentions. This point alone causes me to be unable to use a straightforward interpersonal model. I want to account for the phenomenon of self-deception within an intrapersonal multiple self context, without explicit appeal to interpersonal varieties. I hope that my final account will be strong enough to be tenable, and stemming from an overall view that we have reason to believe is true. My strategy will be the opposite of what one might expect. I will not begin with a set of “rules” according to which different selves operate, and then show how, based on those rules, self-deception is possible (in whatever contexts that deception may take place). Instead, I will be moving in a reverse order. I will begin with examples of self-deception and show that those examples can provide the method for understanding the whole of the “garden varieties” of self-deception. I claim that by properly understanding the variety of self-deception that I will elucidate, we immediately know how to overcome it and pave the way for the possibility and rationality of bundling. Consider the following cases: Case 1: Joe is addicted to heroin. Joe knows that he is addicted to heroin. Joe has previously attempted to break his addiction to heroin, but has failed. Presently, Joe is attempting to resist drawing the syringe, and is engaging in a mental battle described by Ainslie. He first decides that he will use the drug, and then he throws the syringe away. Out of desperation he retrieves it from the wastebasket and stares at it. After a few tense moments, he says to himself, “This hit will be the last. After this, no more.” Joe proceeds to take the heroin. Case 2: Eight hours after Joe has taken the heroin, immediately after the effects have begun to wear off, he thinks about his position, and wonders how he ever got into his current situation. Different reasons pass through his mind. His brain starts a rampage of negative thoughts, “I’m doomed! This is my fate. I am in this state because when I was a child

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THINKING ABOUT ADDICTION my parents treated me poorly, thereby creating my need for an addictive substance. This life is as good as it gets for me. Maybe others have better means, but not me.” Case 3: Joshua has just become intensely angry with his five-year-old son for spilling a glass of milk. Although Joshua is not in the habit of doing this, and although he is usually conciliatory, he loudly and violently castigates his child, who cries in terror. Upon reflection, Joshua justifies his actions thinking, “Oh well, that was the last glass of milk that we had in the house, and I don’t yell at him that much. What harm could one incident cause? Besides, it may have done my son some good my yelling at him like that. I’ll try not to make a habit of it. Regardless, this will be a good lesson for him.”

I will consider these cases one-by-one, pursuing an Ainsliean understanding of their dynamics. I will treat them in reverse order. My best conjecture is that all of us have had an experience like Joshua’s in Case 3, an experience in which we act outside of our better judgment. On an occasion we may, unlike Joshua, own up to our wrongdoing. But we do not always do so. We invent reasons ex post. In the case described, Joshua did not yell at his son because he wanted to teach him a lesson. He did not yell at him because he believed it to be a fitting moment to violate a prima facie moral rule. He yelled because he lacked control over his anger, and outside of his better judgment, he allowed his anger to spill out into violence. Let us assume that at minimum, a weak link exists between a person’s reasons for performing an action, and the cause of the action in question. When Joshua “regains his faculties,” he must come up with an explanation as to why he was morally and rationally permitted to act in such a way. He is not able to appeal to the thoughts that were going through his mind during the deed, because appealing to those mental events will lead to the admission that he ought not to approve of his actions. Instead, he appeals to a set of reasons that hold more credibility in justifying his actions. In this process he ignores the fact that his reasons bear no resemblance to the actual reasons he used. Had they been the true reasons for why he spoke to his son in that manner, then they might have justified his behavior, at least rationally. But Joshua did not yell at his son because he desired to teach his son a lesson. He yelled at his son because he was angry. Normally, Joshua desires to be both rational and moral. But when failing on both counts, he invents rational, morally justificatory explanations ex post. The kind of self-deception described here bears resemblance to both rationalization and wishful thinking. It is a form of rationalization in that it involves an active search for false, though psychologically comfortable, explanations for behavior. It is wishful thinking in the sense that those explanations that we

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find to be accurate because they represent the best-case normative scenario, given the fact of near-past behavior which, prima facie, we regret. I believe this kind of deception to be ubiquitous. For example, academic departments whose members are political liberals consistently refuse to extend tenured positions to their adjuncts, chalking that inconsistent decision to evil deans, uncontrollable climates of capitalism, and the like, when in reality they did not behave as political liberals. For that matter, pervasively politically liberal campuses will consistently refuse to offer adjuncts fair pay or benefits for much the same “reasons.” It would be psychologically uncomfortable for persons who take themselves to be champions of labor fairness to come to believe that they were engaged in, or at least permissive of, labor exploitation. Therefore, faculty invent reasons consistent with their choices which paint a picture that rationally (and morally) exculpates them. The pictures are false, but they remain the pictures that they believe. Who among us, after wronging someone, has never thought, “Well, she deserved it” when in reality, no one deserves such treatment? How often have we observed someone, when cornered for wrongdoing, state their case by proclaiming, “But you don’t understand!” and then launch into an account of reasons that justify the action? Such behaviors are commonplace. Inventing reasons to create a rational and moral story comes naturally to us. My claim is that this phenomenon is, when applied to the intrapersonal context, a theoretically crucial instance of self-deception. Let us ponder Case 2. Joe is attempting to make sense of his past—a past littered with heroin use. In his attempt to make sense of it, he states a series of “reasons” that were the cause of his heroin use, making heroin use intelligible. Joe describes his usage in a perfectly acceptable Rational Choice Theory manner. If it is true, after all, that this is the best life available for him, then he is not rationally to blame for his usage. If his mother really did permanent and irrevocable damage to him, then we would expect him to become self-destructive, and so on ad infinitum and ad nauseum. Hypothetically, let us decide not to acknowledge the accuracy of Joe’s account. We believe that when Joe explains his actions, he is not articulating which causes were involved in the development of his behaviors; we assume that he is grasping at straws. He is attempting to make sense, ex post, of a series of acts whose performance, given the values he now has, are without motivation. When Joe does this, he is deceiving himself. In Ainslie’s terms, we must recall that two “selves” are at play, the “addict self” (S2) and the “non-addict self” (S1). S2 was motivated by one thing—the desire to use the drug. S2 did not care what was in S2’s long-term interests. S2, for that matter, may not have needed to have reasons at all. Because S2 was in control at the time, S2 got to do what it wanted. The problem with this is that S2 never has to clean up the mess. For when the mess is present, S2 has “checked out.” S1 must deal with the mess, when S1 appears.

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I am not assuming that, were S1 always in control, things would invariably go better for the person. Luck and unknown circumstances can make things turn out badly for even the most consistent agents. The general point is that S1’s interests are long-term, and S2’s are short-term. The notion that individuals are multiples or populations is counterintuitive. This would mean that when S1 is present with the “mess,” S1 finds it natural to believe that S1 was the one who decided to take the drug. If S1 tends to be reasonable, and if S1 believes that S1 was the one who took the heroin, then S1 must conclude that it must have been reasonable by S1’s standards to take the heroin. If it was reasonable, then there must be some preference that S1 holds in virtue of which it would have a reason for taking the drug. But there is no reason apparent to S1 which is both consistent with what S1 values now, and which would indicate usage. S1 must invent reasons. Self-deception occurs when S1 attempts to “own” another’s actions. Because S1 is reasonable, the very act of attempting to own the action requires explanation. But no reason that S1 would ever have would motivate him to perform the action. Therefore, S1 invents outlandish reasons. I propose that Ainslie endorse what I will call a “dehyphenated” view of self-deception. Self-deception is not so much “self-deception” as it is “self deception.” It is the phenomenon of believing that the actions performed in the past were actions that you did in the past under the same set of preferences that you have now. But this belief is false. Those actions that a person did in the past which were inconsistent with what one values now were actions done under a different set of preferences. But to say that an action was done according to a different set of preferences is just to say, using the apparatus of Ainslie’s hyperbolic discounting system, that it was done by a different self. Presumably, the grammatical reason why we use a hyphen in the term “self-deception” is to reflexively link the act of deception to the deceiver; the one doing the deceiving is also the one who is being deceived. By removing the dash, I am not attempting to perform a cute linguistic trick. I am attempting to point out that the best way to understand self-deception in a hyperbolic discounting system is to understand it as a system that divorces the deceiver from the deceived. The hyperbolic discounter who is deceived by the self is not a person whose self simultaneously holds preferences and acts in violation of them. Rather, the hyperbolic discounter who is deceived by the self is a discounter whose current self erroneously attempts to make sense of (or “accommodate”) the actions performed under a different set of preferences in terms that would cohere with the set of preferences that the discounter currently has. I hope to show that by understanding self-deception as a form of “self deception” accommodates garden variety self-deception, but does so in a manner consistent with diachronically distinct selves. Let us return to some of Mele’s terminology: the difference between motivated and unmotivated bias and the concept’s role in explaining self-

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deception. Recall Mele’s study of female caffeine drinkers. When they were presented evidence of the deleterious effects of caffeine consumption, they exhibited a disproportionately large incidence of reticence to accept the truth of the evidence. Following Mele’s unitary self account, the caffeine drinkers did not balk at the evidence based on their desire to accommodate the preferences of past selves. Instead, they engaged in motivated biased belief formation practices because they had great stakes in preserving their rational status as caffeine drinkers. If they had accepted the new data, they would have had to change their behavior. Not sufficiently motivated to do so, Mele chalks up their intransigence to biased belief formation practices. I do not quibble with Mele’s ingenious explanation of self-deception. But I would add that we can account for self-deception in a manner in keeping with Mele’s insights, while tailoring it for the multiple-self view under consideration. The general insight that the multiple-self proponent ought to rely upon is that we have great psychological stakes in preserving our belief in being a unitary self. Without difficulty, we could, for example, argue that the Cartesian legacy, perhaps even in light of Christian teachings of the nature of persons, has exerted a strong grip on our intuitions about ourselves. Strong cultural reasons may exist for denying that we are by nature a succession of selves. But we need not engage in cultural critiques to show why we have great stakes in preserving our belief in being a unitary self. For at any point in which we reflect upon actions committed in the near past, which appear to be in conflict with the values that we have now, we have interests in interpreting those past events in a manner that permits us to preserve the belief that we are unitary (despite the obvious evidence which attests to the opposite). So, if the successive selves view is correct, but if unitary self-believers always have been multiples, then for those who desire to preserve their belief in being unitary selves, such persons stand in need of an explanation of their own actions. Whatever the explanation ends up being, the explanation must retain the undeniable fact of actions that appear inconsistent, but which manages to posit psychological facts about those acts which renders them consistent with what one values now. To that end, a motive to rationalize actions ex post may be possible. This appears, at first glance, to be a successive-self version of motivated biased belief formation practices. But I cannot categorically state that the version of “self deception” that I am proposing is necessarily motivated, because another sense exists in which this might not be. The difference between motivated and unmotivated bias is the degree to which the agent in question is capable of actively keeping tabs on the processes that produce the belief formation. In one sense, keeping active tabs on the process of rationalizing the behavior of another self of mine may be possible. However, accepting a non-unitary self is so counterintuitive that the difficulty of keeping tabs on their individual operations might very well

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render “self deception” a case of unmotivated bias, very much like the tendency to always search for causal connections using the availability heuristic. I leave it open whether my account of self-deception is of the motivated or the unmotivated variety. But in an effort to show how my proposed version of self-deception succeeds in capturing our fundamental intuitions about the cases in which we would use the term, returning to our illustrative will be helpful. So far, I have generally spoken of self deception as an intellectual effort to attempt to make sense of an inconsistent past. I do not deny that this will very often be the case, but this will not exclusively be the case. In Case 1, we see Joe in the process of making the decision to use heroin. At a crucial moment in time, he embraces one rationale: that this will be his last hit, and then he will quit. Notice that Joe rationalizes his action prior to committing it. Our non-addict S1 is capable of inductively forecasting the behavior that is about to occur. If S1 suspects that he is about to lose control via the same processes that have been described so far, S1 may perceive the need to offer a rationale at that time. Then, the process of rationalizing behavior need not be post-dated with respect to the time of action. It may be simultaneous with, or even precede the action in question. But on my account, all that must occur in order for there to be instances of self deception is for the agent in question to invent a rationalized account for action the performance of which is patently inconsistent with what I prefer now. There is reason to believe that this sort of belief-forming practice occurs in addiction and substance abuse cases. Expectancy Theory is a theory of addictive practice that has many similarities to my account. In a meticulously documented work, Judith Rumgay (1998) chronicles courtroom proceedings in a British magistrates’ court. In addition to the proceedings, she documents conversations with the judges and defendants. She concluded that mitigation is as much influenced by what the judge and the defendant expect of alcoholics as it is by the facts of particular cases for which the defendants found themselves before the court. Using the language I have presented, we can cast Rumgay’s findings as a magistrate inventing ex post reasons for prior behavior of alcoholics, regardless of whether the invented explanations were true. Rumgay’s work presents a unsettling account of the ways in which folk explanations of inconsistent behavior can become enshrined in legal judgment. 5. Reverse Self Deception If our “hero” S1, is capable of self deception, then why not S2? I see no reason why not. Here is how one of the previous scenarios might go: The addict, S2, desires to use heroin, but has the unfortunate circumstance of being admitted into an inpatient rehabilitation facility. Unbeknownst to S2, the decision to do so was a calculated precommitment

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device on the part of S1. S2 is not aware of self deception (no hyphen), and thinks that it was its decision to do so. S2 believes that S2 decided to commit itself. What are we to say about the motivational and deliberative states of S2? We can imagine some intriguing alternatives: S2 could enter into a state of Mele-style self-deception, reasonably inferring that every memory that it has about its past deliberations is veridical of events stemming from S2’s deliberations. S2 believes that the only way that it could be rationally justified in committing itself is if it is what S2 prefers. Granted this is not what S2 truly prefers; S2 is self-deceived. Or, S2 could decide after entering into a state of self deception, to engage in a Pascalian belief-acquisition process. Such a process is one in which a person who desires to arrive at a belief that they presently do not hold ought to engage in behavior that has the potential to influence, or even cause, the belief’s assent. Pascal used the example of a theistic belief. A person who does not believe in the existence of God, but who desires to believe in the existence of God, ought to go to church (an active behavior) instead of reading philosophy texts. Doing so will eventually cause the person to come to believe that God exists. Likewise, should S2 participate in the program’s recovery process, perhaps S2’s beliefs will change. This change would thereby erase the self deception. Consequently, S2 becomes more like S1. Finally, S2 could engage in introspection where it realizes that it is a victim of self deception (no hyphen) as described in the section above, and shunning the idea of deception, which leads to venturing out of the restrictive confines of inpatient drug rehabilitation in search of another fix. 6. Conclusion, Suggestions, and Foreshadowing I have presented a new instance of self-deception, which I have termed “dehyphenated.” Such “self deception” occurs when one self attempts to give reasons for the actions of another self that does not share the same desires. What an agent is deceived about, then, is not merely the propositional content of the beliefs in question, but about the origins of those beliefs to the actions in question. This account is similar to Davidson’s, with the exception that I have clarified the nature of the mental partitioning he suggests by appealing to Ainslie’s model of intertemporal bargaining among selves. Unlike Davidson, I have eased the demand for a single agent to hold a contradiction as true. Therefore, I may be forced to concede to Mele that self-deceived individuals do not believe contradictions. But I take it as self-evident that the version of self deception that I present here would fail to sufficiently demystify the phenomenon by his lights. This view has a potentially undesirable consequence: It does entail that self deception is abundant. Self deception occurs whenever one self attempts

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to explain behavior it mistakenly believes is its own, but which is the behavior of another. We would be reasonable to assume that self deception occurs just as frequently as reversals of preference and of control. Generally, people are chronic self-deceivers on this view because they are chronic hyperbolic discounters. Having accounted for self deception among hyperbolic discounters with successive selves, we can now turn to perhaps our largest problem to deliberate. In the next chapter, I will use the insights we have now developed to show how bundling as a means of overcoming the irrationalities of hyperbolic discounting is possible, rational and desirable.

Five TOWARD THE RATIONALITY OF BUNDLING 1. Introduction With an Ainsliean view of the self in hand, and an instance of self deception described, I will now articulate a rationale for “bundling” that piggybacks on this view of the self and its unusual operations, which thereby renders the act of bundling to be possible and rational. I will begin by noting what Ainslie says on the matter and then continue with my position, showing how the restrictive and troublesome bundling behavior can resemble something just as desirable as liberation. This liberation occurs when an agent comes to believe that it is a population. That belief is rationally incompatible with “self deception” as described in Chapter Three. This rational incompatibility either requires behavior that mimics exponential curves, or straightforward blatant irrationality. The liberated agent is in the “right” because there does exist a sort of “governance of the self,” which itself can be rationally justified. More importantly, this approach to bundling also overcomes Ainslie’s fears regarding the tyranny a bundling agent might experience. A person freed from “self deception” (no hyphen) no longer has the longing for behavior that is inconsistent with the bundling rule. I do not claim to offer the only way to render possible and rational the phenomenon of bundling. I am simply offering one possible method and leave the topic open for other avenues. 2. Ainslie on Bundling Through understanding Ainslie’s notion of “bundling” and elucidating the dialectical predicament in which bundlers find themselves, we will set the stage for my treatment of the issue. That treatment will render bundling both rational and possible. As early as 1992 (a; b), and echoed in other publications thereafter (Ainslie and Monterosso, 2003a), Ainslie offered bundling as a way to mimic exponential curves as a solution to the irrationality of hyperbolic discounting. According to this view, we are required to wrestle our hyperbolic nature into an exponential regime, as if generalizing under a Kantian rule. Ainslie describes it this way in Breakdown of Will: Does this apparent universality of hyperbolic discounting mean that utility theorists through the ages have been wrong—that philosophers and bankers and welfare economists should have been calculating the worth

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THINKING ABOUT ADDICTION of goods using deeply bowed curves . . .? That can’t be true either . . . exponential discounting in some cases is better than hyperbolic discounting, in the sense that exponential discounters win out in competition with hyperbolic discounters . . . .” (2001, p. 35)

Ainslie and John R. Monterosso clarified the rational or normative requirement to mimic exponential curves. They offer a simple externalistic requirement for rationality: Given hyperbolic curves, a single theoretical definition of rationality stands out: the course of action that serves your longest-range interest. This will be the only course that is both intrinsically stable and has the intuitive advantage that—in the last analysis—you are glad to have followed it. (2003d, p. 853) Given what we have reviewed so far in this chapter, two problems confront us. Jon Elster points out the most obvious of them in Strong Feelings: Whether hyperbolic discounting and the consequent preference reversal are instances of irrationality remains debatable. On the one hand, consistency is often the hallmark of rationality. On the other hand, if hyperbolic discounting is a hardwired feature of the organism, the principle “‘ought’ implies “can’” suggests that it would be pointless to characterize it as irrational. (1999c, pp. 170–171) Elster did not have the advantage in 1999, of having read Ainslie and Monterosso (2003d). If we adopt an externalistic definition of rationality, then the declaration that hyperbolic behavior is irrational is not “pointless.” Elster launches an internalistic critique, to which Ainslie could reply merely by claiming that Elster’s account of rationality is incorrect. What is rational, Ainslie claims, does not dependent on what one believes, but on what produces utility. Michael Bratman (1999, pp. 35–57) raises a similar point, to which I will refer as the “magical thinking” objection. Ainslie has told us that we are to somehow “bundle” or “group” our decisions in such a way as to make individual decisions over an entire group of actions, not just one instance of a member of that group. However, if hyperbolic discounting is the status quo, how we can do so is difficult to imagine, other than by “magic.” Does Ainslie’s insistence upon an externalistic account of rationality overcome Elster and Bratman’s objections? In a sense it does. If we are to understand the objection in question as stating that bundling behavior is not rational, then if we were to re-define what is rational as being none other than action that produces the most benefit, then Ainsliean bundlers are rational.

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But such a response to the objection stands in serious peril of being either an ad hoc dodge at best, or the redefinist fallacy at worst. I believe that Ainslie’s response to these objections is rendered much more plausible by engaging in one of Ainslie’s analyses of the problem. He is most frequently preoccupied with a second sort of problem, one within the hyperbolic system itself, and one that is not, as I characterized it earlier, so “obvious.” The problem is that if we were to grant that the action of bundling is psychologically possible, those who succeed in bundling would appear to be doomed to results that are comparably as bad as those results obtained by choosing in only a strict hyperbolic manner. The bundling “cure” is also its own form of poison. Ainslie has chronicled an extensive list of the negative side effects of bundling in various publications. Here is a brief sketch of his list: (1) When we bundle according to a rule, the rules may overshadow goods in themselves. (2) When we break a rule according to which we have bundled, we are in danger of “magnifying lapses.” (3) Following rules gives us great motivation to misperceive the facts in a given situation. (4) Rules serve compulsions, and can be just as compulsive as addictions. (5) Always following rules can be detrimental to our long-range interest. (6) The invocation of willpower causes dissociation in the addict, especially in those cases in which the preference reversal was extreme. (List derived from Ainslie, 1999a, pp. 71–77; Ainslie, 2001, pp. 143–160; Ainslie and Monterosso, 2003d, pp. 845–848) In short, the decisions we make to avoid the disaster of a life lived in accordance with hyperbolically discounted curves could have all the negative effects that philosophers have launched against Kantian and other deontologies. Consequently, we become passionless slaves to the rule. We appear to be in a position not so much typified by the maxim “damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” but by a much more abbreviated version of it: “We are damned.” At this juncture, we might be tempted to try to show, in a head-on fashion, how to resolve the bundling problem—how to show that grouping and acting according to a rule is possible and rational. Given the notion of dehyphenated self deception I outlined in Chapter Three, a new back-door route is available. In the following section, I will show how recovery from dehyphenated self deception “naturally” leads to behavior that appears bundling-like in nature. If we were to come to grips with the truth of our “selves” and the motivational structure that selects our choices, these negative side effects necessarily disappear.

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THINKING ABOUT ADDICTION 3. How to Find Yourself Bundling Without Even Trying

When writing on the notion of the weakness of will, philosophers commonly notice that while the vast majority of the public is concerned with how to prevent it, philosophers worry about how it is possible in the first place. My approach will be somewhat different. In my discussion of bundling, I will explore what the necessary results would be of becoming aware of dehyphenated self deception. Granted that this form of self deception is possible, I will show how one might eschew it. I claim that by considering the epistemic situation of a person who has come to believe that they have been “self deceived” (in the dehyphenated sense) and who takes steps to cease the deception, we will see how bundling behavior comes about as a matter of course. Rather than attempting to show that self-deception is possible, I will begin with the supposition that the form of dehyphenated self deception that I have constructed is actual for hyperbolic discounters. I will then draw out what I take to be the necessary psychological consequences for a hyperbolic discounter who is aware of this actuality in their life. This solution is consistent with some literature that discusses choice theory. Edward McClennen has offered one route for rationally justifying bundling behavior in his Pragmatic Rationality and Rules. However, he explicitly leaves out the case of addiction. In a footnote he writes: Ulysses’ problem, it should be noted, is subject to two different interpretations. On the first, the story of the Sirens and their song is a metaphor for a situation in which an agent anticipates that his will-power will be literally overwhelmed by some external power (the Sirens and their Song). Faced with this, Ulysses reasonably takes precaution and has himself tied to the mast. Interpreted this way, the story connects naturally with the problem posed for a rational agent with a physically addictive drug. On a second interpretation, the story is a metaphor for a situation in which an agent projects that his preferences will change over time . . . . In what follows, I will focus on intrapersonal struggles of the second kind. (1997, p. 217) My goal is to account for the reasonableness of bundling much like the first kind, which McClennen intentionally ignores. The difference, however, is that I will not presuppose that the addict is utterly overpowered by an Aristotelian external force. At the same time, I will not assume that the addict has been seduced to the degree that the addict cannot be construed as merely experiencing preference shifts. Insofar as McClennen’s “resolute choosing” might not be a viable option for the addict, I claim that my method may not be suitable for the non-addict.

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With our concept of the self in mind, along with the schemata of self deception laid out in the previous section, I ask, “What would it be like to become aware of such a self and of self deception as I describe it?” We can reasonably assume that hyperbolic discounters are frequently in a position to come to know that they have been self deceived in the dehyphenated sense. If, for example, we are ever in a position in which we perceive the need to choose “resolutely,” on those occasions we are also in a position to believe that we have and will experience preference reversals. The notion of resolute choice, if it is a coherent one, presupposes the foundational building blocks of self deception (dehyphenated), preference reversals, and motivational shifts. Also, coming to believe that the self is constituted in the way I have portrayed it, and coming to believe that self deception occurs as I claim it does, causes a set of other beliefs to become untenable. Some of those beliefs that cannot exist and be held simultaneously, should a person come to believe that they are the kinds of self-containing persons described by Ainslie include the following. For the purpose of clarity, I include “S1” and “S2” demarcations in keeping with the variety of “rational self” and “irrational self” examples that I have used throughout the book. But nothing in these principles require any single self to be the possessor of the following false beliefs (hence my calling them “FBn”). That is, the irrational self could hold them as well: FB1: The “I” (S1), who is now deliberating, is identical with the “I” (S2) who chooses to use the drug. The present deliberator (S1) is the past deliberator (S2). FB2: “I” (S1) has good reason to use the drug for reasons that “I” (S1) consider “good.” FB3: The reasons that “I” (S1) have given for past usage are the reasons that account for “my” (S2’s) usage. FB4: When at tn, “I” (S1) defend “my” (S2’s) actions at tn-y, the actions “I” (S1) defended were “mine” (S1’s). Admittedly, such a realization would cause an agent to maintain several other beliefs as false. While more problematic, nothing prohibits self deception in advance of the inconsistent action rather than only after the fact. Such a case might occur when S1 anticipates the emergence of S2 and perceives the need to make an explanation ahead of time. However, for the sake of simplicity, I will concentrate only on those cases of justification after the fact. This list will serve to illustrate my point. What compels a person to desire to become rational in Ainsliean terms is the awareness that less-than-the-best has been achieved (or, if not, at mini-

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mum, that “not-very-good-at-all” has been achieved). By coming to believe in the falsity of all of the FBn above, the agent in question must not only be engaged in intrapersonal warfare, but the agent is forced to believe that it is. When such an agent assesses its addiction-littered life and the havoc it creates, that agent can usually identify culprit S2 as being the source for the error. While the agents who come to believe that they have been self deceived may not self-analyze in as detailed a manner as we have used in our philosophical analysis, they surely reflect upon their past and decide that they cannot identify with it. I do not claim that agents in this situation are not allowed to deny all identity whatsoever between himself (S1) and his foe (S2). In the next chapter, when I account for moral responsibility, I will argue that in a strong sense, S1 is responsible for S2 in much the same way in which a civilized society is occasionally responsible for creating criminogenetic social circumstances. With the understanding of the non-unitary self in place, we must abandon some old beliefs, however “folk” they may be. After the agent in question understands that it has been self deceived and that it has been an active participant in this deception by offering ad hoc rationalizations for the behavior in question, two options present themselves: honesty or dishonesty. For a dishonest agent in this circumstance to exist may not even be possible. If such an agent is possible, what the agent must do is the extraordinary, the “magical.” It must concurrently believe: (1) That it has played a part in its self-deception; (2) That the reasons it (S1) gave for its (S2’s) behavior are not the actual reasons why the behavior occurred in the first place; and (3) That (1) and (2) are reasonable beliefs to simultaneously maintain. We might call this mental gymnastic feat “second-order self deception,” in that it is self deception about whether we are self deceived. Following Mele, we can also say that believing (1)–(3) is fully intentional and contradictory in nature. Belief in only (1) and (2) is problematic. Adding (3) is worse. I will not state categorically that this type of belief set is impossible to adopt. But this set of beliefs is novel in an epistemologically significant way. This sort of belief set would only be believable by an agent after arriving at the belief that it is self-deceived. Therefore, it resembles Davidson’s insistence that self-deception occurs when an agent is presented with evidence that an undesirable belief is true, and because of that truth, the agent endeavors to believe the opposite. For an agent to hold such a belief-set for any considerable amount of time would be difficult. One and the same agent would have to believe that it is intentionally believing to be true something that is false. Moreover, because these beliefs are simultaneously held by some agent (Sn), any mental parti-

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tioning to soften the psychological blow to the believer would be quite difficult to imagine. Perhaps the only recourse for an addict in such a situation is to consume psychoactive drugs that might efface awareness of belief in any of (1)–(3). The alternative is that in this state of crisis, the agent could become honest (or “rational”). The agent could admit that it has been frequently defeated by another self and that it has participated in those defeats in the most embarrassing of ways by actively ensuring that the defeats continue. If the agent should become honest, the predicament resembles not so much a decision theorist’s puzzle as a divorce or separation from an abusive relationship. A divorce does not describe a single discrete event at only one point in time. It does not begin and end with the lowering of a gavel in a courtroom, but is a prolonged process. Even in the most abusive of relationships, persons who have endured divorce report emotions that resemble mourning. Rage, fear, sadness, and personal embarrassment abound. Individual parties may come to realize that they had been “deceiving themselves” into believing the lies that their partners had told them. They may even have assured suspecting outside observers of the uprightness of philandering spouses. A person who has separated from a physically violent spouse must come to grips with the shame of having “knowingly” permitted the relationship to last as long as it did. For persons to become honest is just for them to remove those impediments that caused their life to become as bad as it had become. True, initially this might result in a person’s being a bit worse off. Continuing the divorce allegory, the divorcer may think that suffering the effects of physical harm and being homeless is worse than merely being physically harmed. In such cases, hyperbolic discounters would choose to stay in the relationship. Addicts face similar hard choices during their moment of revelation. On the one hand, they can continue to use heroin and feel bad because of it, or commit to inpatient drug rehabilitation and endure a month of anguish only to venture out later into an uncertain future. Again, the strict hyperbolic discounter opts for dishonesty and continues to use heroin. Note the difference between the hyperbolic discounters and the hyperbolic discounters who recognize that they are hyperbolic discounters (those who have had moments of “revelation”). Unlike the state of affairs before the discovery of self deception, the hyperbolic discounter must knowingly engage in “self deceptive” behavior: identifying with motives that it believes are not its own. While I cannot immediately rule out this sort of behavior as a psychological impossibility, I do assert that it would be immensely psychologically unstable to instantiate its possibility. The fate of the hyperbolic discounter who has attempted to become an exponential discounter, however, is much different. Previously, exponential discounters were rationally required to behave exponentially with little or no desire to do so, other than “for the sake of the rule.” They were hyperbolic discounters convinced of their rational depravity, who attempted to “magically”

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use a valuation technique that was mismatched given their nature as hyperbolic discounters. However, after the discovery of “self deception,” while it may still be true that it bundles for the sake of the rule, it also bundles because doing so mirrors those things, which it has come to value. Among those new things it has come to value is valuating only on the basis of the preferences it has. Heretofore, I have followed Ainslie by construing hyperbolic discounting as a case of intrapersonal warfare occurring behind the scenes of consciousness. But I now observe that this intrapersonal warfare only takes place behind the scenes when self deception is successful. But for the honest person, dehyphenated self deception in this usual way is no longer possible. The addict is capable, by refusing to engage in self deception, of mirroring exponential curves. The discounter is able to do that by doing what the reasonable person (S1) wants most. But what the discounter must not do is to do what another self (S2) wants. In brief, bundling behavior comes about because of the psychological incompatibility of becoming aware of self deception and employing those measures that promoted hyperbolic discounting. A person is psychologically incapable of simultaneously being aware of dehyphenated self deception and continuing to perform akratic action (on Ainslie’s definition). A few strategies will be useful in helping discounters to become more autonomous. First, they might want to become brutally sophisticated choosers. They might want to think carefully about what is likely to occur in the future, based on what has happened in the past. Previously, they used addictive drugs everyday without fail. The discounters ought to ensure that they set up safeguards in the future to help them avoid giving in to the other self. Persons might attempt more extreme measures. They could tie themselves to a mast, commit themselves into a treatment center, or confess to crimes that would result in their incarceration (and relatively safe from their temptations). Persons could decide to make incriminating confessions not so much out of a desire to rectify social debt, but to guarantee that even if their undesired self should gain control, it would not gain permanent or effective control. Note that these extreme measures all commit a person to some state for an irrevocable period of time. This fact coheres with claims that I made earlier concerning the visceral nature of addictions. Recall that when I depicted the nature of the selves, I claimed that visceral susceptibility is something acquired in addiction. The addict self is a self that comes into existence most likely because of a deeply biological phenomenon. This biological adaptation will likely take some time to be undone, regardless of what the contents of the addict’s mental life may be. How much time might be needed by addicts to break the biological ties, or what the exact nature of those ties are will require investigation by those in the biological sciences. But we can plausibly assert that persons with addictions to chemical substances will need some amount of time to undo the neurobiological adaptation that has occurred.

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I am neither claiming that S2’s existence is purely attributable to biology, nor am I willing to naively separate the mind from the body. Biological factors are only a part of sobriety. The addict recovering from self deception must also identify and change those behaviors that led to S2’s dominance and to S1’s collaboration in that dominance. Admittedly, this would require a high level of self-awareness that may never be completely possible. Where do these observations concerning the believed discovery of self deception leave us? We have observed that along with the acknowledgment of self deception comes a moment of crisis. This moment must (rationally) lead to drastic change. But given the dynamics of that moment, behavior that resembles bundling is likely to emerge. In short, I have presented a liberation account of bundling. The mere psychological fact of acknowledging self deception causes a person to behave as an exponential discounter. However, if the solution that I have presented is to hold any credence, I should also be able to show how my proposed solution responds to the various difficulties, which Ainslie raises regarding the bundling cure. What unifies all of the criticisms that Ainslie launches against his solution is the contention that that the any hyperbolically discounting agent, who attempts to bundle, will desire the short-term gain (because they remain hyperbolic discounters) and desire the long-term reward (because they believe that they ought to bundle according to some rule). In traditional hyperbolic discounting cases, agents always chose the smaller-sooner reward. But the agent who bundles in the manner Ainslie describes must bundle everything for the sake of the rule. The rule itself tyrannizes. The agent who adopts the bundling rule, whatever it may be, has not shed his preference for those things that are in direct opposition to that rule. But under the stipulations of my view, not only has the rule been adopted, but also it is the most natural rule the agent could have. The agent has directly disavowed those motives held by the other selves, which caused the tyranny in the first place. Ainslie has offered several possible “negative side effects” of the activity of bundling. After presenting them in list-form, I will explain how my proposed solution overcomes each of these negative side-effects: (1) Rules overshadow goods in themselves. (2) Rule followers magnify lapses of that rule. (3) Rule followers are motivated to misperceive facts. (4) Rule following can be as compulsive as addictions. (5) Rule following is to the detriment of our long-range interests. (6) Willing rules causes dissociation (list derived from Ainslie, 1999a, pp. 71–77; Ainslie, 2001, pp. 143–160; Ainslie and Monterosso, 2003d, pp. 845–848).

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According to the first assertion, rules would overshadow goods in themselves for any agent who bundles in favor of choosing hyperbolically. But this would only occur if the agent were not motivated to use the rule as a means to the end of acquiring what that agent truly desires. In my view, the agent desires only those things that the bundling rule offers (or, perhaps, the consequences of those things). Within each decision over a member of the bundled set, the agent is disassociated from the self that would have caused the hyperbolic discount equation to spike in the first place and they perceive themselves to be disassociated from that self. So, in each individual circumstance, the agent chooses what Ainslie describes as an option that a “bundler” would choose. However, while possibly the sole reason they do this is the rule, this does not need to be the case in every circumstance in which one chooses a bundled good. Instead, an agent could choose the option consistent with the bundling rule solely because it desires that option the most. Thus the goods are not overshadowed by the rule. The agent attains the goods by using the rule because following the rule is what the agent most desires. The agent I have been describing would not “magnify lapses” as Ainslie suggests in his second assertion. His fear is that the agent who only adopted the rule because it would set a precedent would be inclined to think that the good that the precedent was to achieve was lost the moment it (the adopted rule) was broken. That is, if the only reason I adopted the rule was to create precedent, and now the precedent is lost, that violation of the precedent effectively loses the good that it was to have achieved in the first place. But on my view, when a lapse occurs, it is a lapse in violation of what I now desire, not in what I hope to desire in the future. The lapse would be a mere lapse. It would not change my utility function. The reason why it would not change my utility function is simple. Ainslie appears to view agents who bundle as being immensely fragile in that they, through the power of the will, attempt to overcome a basic modus operandi—the tendency to valuate hyperbolically—that will never go away. This will is frequently too weak to be able to perform such a task. This is why Ainslie offers bundling as a solution—the agent views choices in a way that allows the agent to believe in a kind of false necessity. Agents need to perceive the rule as absolutely inviolable, and they need to view their present situation as an instance in which they must follow the rule. In Ainslie’s view, nothing stands between the violation of the rule this time and the violation of the rule every time, except for the agent’s belief that adherence to the rule will save the agent from always breaking the rule. In my view, something exists in addition to the rule that will prevent disaster: the agent’s new knowledge of what it truly prefers. In my view, rule followers would have no reason to be motivated to misperceive facts as Ainslie suggests in his third assertion. He feared that “fallen bundlers” would actively distort the fact that they fell in an attempt to

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preserve the precedent-making nature of their having ever followed the rule in the first place. But the allure of having to create a precedent has been expunged on my view because the agent in question no longer identifies itself with the agent in opposition to whom the precedent was initially created. For when the hero (S1) no longer believes itself to be motivated by S2’s reasons, then the motivation to misinterpret evidence is removed. Ainslie has expressed worry that rules themselves might just be other compulsions (fourth assertion). In my view, rules are only as compulsive as preferences, for they are created as the most natural result of the preferences any agent has come to obtain. So, if acting in accordance with the preferences is species of compulsion then we are always compulsive regardless of the behavioral theoretic account we adopt. But this is incorrect. The agent I envision is not compulsive, but is doing exactly what it most wants to do. Obviously, contrary to Ainslie’s fears that rule following is to the detriment of our long-range interests (fifth assertion), bundling in the manner in which I suggest would not be to the detriment of long-range interests unless being an exponential discounter is to the detriment of those interests. Ainslie’s fear is that, in the long range, bundling agents will suffer from all of the maladies mentioned above. But this would only be true if choosing exponentially led to overall disutility. On my view, it will not. Finally, contrary to Ainslie’s view that willing rules cause dissociation, the agents I envision would not suffer dissociation of the kind Ainslie fears. Ainslie’s idea is that when attempting to implement a bundling rule, agents violate that rule; they will become detached from the self. This result is likely because it places persons in a position in which they actively believe that they desire some bundled good, for they desire to act in accordance with a bundled rule. Their actions suggest that they truly believe that they have not done so. The psychological result will be to disassociate the agent’s present self from the agent’s past self. If an agent fears that it will continue to break the rule, the agent might then disassociate its present self from its future self. Contrary to Ainslie’s position, I hold that the recovery from self deception is one of association, not disassociation. The agent comes to know itself when it bundles in the manner I have described in this chapter. The bundling agent, the one who has overcome dehyphenated self deception, clearly associates with its preferences. True, some kind of disassociation is occurring, even under my proposed solution. But this disassociation is exactly the one that we would desire to see come about. The agent which has recovered from self deception disassociates itself from the self whose values are now known to be inconsistent with what it (S1) wants. But no radical “divorce” is in play in my formulation. For I can look in the past and see S1 there, and I can know that, in the future, if S2 arises, that self is not one with which S1 identifies. S1 disassociates itself not from all selves, but only from S2 and any other selves resembling S2.

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THINKING ABOUT ADDICTION 4. Self-Governance: A Problem

Having laid out my case for the rationality of bundling, the time has come to address the problem of self-governance that I briefly mentioned in Chapter Three. In a system of successive selves, we see as spectators on the “outside” of the collection of selves in question, that some selves are highly destructive to the person while others are highly beneficial. An investment banker, for example, might adeptly manage his 401k, but drink excessively during the evenings, making him unable to reap the benefits of his exponential behavior. His self qua investment banker is in the right, and his self qua alcoholic is in the wrong. So, should we care about this unfortunate banker, we root for the manager in him, and hope for the demise of the alcoholic. We can conceive of three agents with different perspectives in this story: the banker-as-401k-manager, the alcoholic within that banker’s skin, and us as observers of this person’s life. Each of these agents can act a judge, each from its unique perspective. Applying Ainslie’s criteria for rationality— which does maximize utility—we as outside judges can immediately conclude which of the two banker-selves is in the right. Matters are not so easy should we give equal normative footing to the 401K manager and the alcoholic while forbidding outside judges as Ainslie recommends. Following the picture of the self that I offered in Chapter Three, let us assume that each of those two is an entity unto itself, accidentally bound together by ongoing warfare and memory. If so, then while the manager is likely to be justified in believing it best to stop drinking, the alcoholic is also justified in believing it best to continue to drink. When the alcoholic arrives at the scene, it is only doing what seems most reasonable—it is merely choosing based on its preferences. If only two legitimate perspectives are in this story, and if those two are the perspectives of the 401k manager and the alcoholic, we have no obvious way to account for “rightness” of any one self versus any other. We would need a legitimate outside judge to make such a claim. What reasons can we give to show that the alcoholic is in the wrong? If we can give none, then when we root for the manager to win, all we are doing is rooting. We are not rooting because right is on our side. To further illustrate the point, imagine the following case: Mark is deciding whether to get a tattoo of his girlfriend’s name. Right now, he is deeply committed to her, has bought her an engagement ring, and made preparations for their future together. As he is about to sit down in the tattoo artist’s chair, he begins to have doubts. Does he really want an irremovable emblem emblazoned on him? What if he comes to dislike it later? Is he doing something now that he may come to regret? Cast in the terms of past, present, and future selves, what this case shows is that, should we have sympathies for Mark’s second thoughts while simulta-

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neously accepting that he perceives himself to be quite committed to his girlfriend, a person may have obligations to the other selves that do not share the same values that the present self has. If we have sympathy for Mark in his second-guessing, it is not because we take his love to be insincere or inadequate, but because we understand that to accept our self to have obligations toward our future self is reasonable. But if we do have such obligations, then ought S1s take into moral consideration selves such as S2, and, consequently, the values they act upon? To explore this possibility, let us assume that S1s do have obligations toward S2s. One thing that is desirable about S2-type selves is that they are spontaneous, daring, and thoroughly enjoy pleasure. No doubt, part of the allure of maintaining an addiction is that while behaving qua addict, a person is sometimes able to have more fun, even if that fun is ephemeral and deleterious in the long-term. Reasonable selves might very well live stodgy, predictable lives which, per se, are no fun at all. Perhaps because of this character trait of S1-type selves, we can acknowledge that a redeeming quality persists about S2 in comparison to S1, when it comes to spontaneity. But the bundling formulation I have presented in this chapter has by no means permitted the accommodation of S2. If we can come to behave exponentially, that would call for the effective extinction of S2-type agents. The question, then, is whether it is reasonable of S1-type selves to permit the continued existence of S2-type selves. The operant question that decides whether we grant permission to these selves to exist is, “Can the self in question continue to exist, but in moderation?” When it comes to addiction, the answer is “No.” This is not to say that agents do not frequently attempt moderation, probably the most frequently attempted recovery device among addicts. However, the instances where moderation is successful for bona fide addicts are relatively few. Largely, addicts have ample inductive evidence to confirm that attempts at moderation will result in returning to a full-fledged addiction. We are forced to conclude as S1s, that S2s should not be given liberty, for they are a mortal threat to the general population of selves. Is this convincing to the S2s of this world? Absolutely not. Is there anything that we could say to the S2s, or some general framework that we could set up that renders more authority to our scathing decision against S2s? We can find it in John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971). His account of justice provides for the legitimacy of the third perspective. I have referred to S2 as the “addict self” and S1 as the “reasonable self.” By that characterization, I do not intend to state that S2 is not capable of reasoning, or that it does not use reason. S2 is capable of instrumental and practical reasoning, and possibly capable of much more. I have called S1 “reasonable” because S1 manages to maximize utility. Turning to the most fundamental of Rawlsean intuitions, consider the collection of selves unified by a continuing power relation and by memory.

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Place them in a state of reflective equilibrium behind a veil of ignorance. This veil prevents them from knowing how many Ss exist, and which of the Ss they happen to be. Then, based upon the fact that an S2 does exist, have the veiled selves decide what to do with that S2. How could such deliberators do anything other than choose to deny privileges to S2? They would not, for S2 will cause the demise of the whole society of the selves, should it be permitted to lead. Therefore, the veil renders a normative priority to the S1s, and not the S2s. The process of foregoing hyperbolic discounting in favor of inpatient drug rehabilitation and consequent withdrawal is also bolstered by Rawls’s “just savings principle” (ibid., §44). A just savings principle is a rate at which current generations are permitted to save for future ones. This savings rate is decided upon behind the veil of ignorance. In Rawls’s words: The parties do not know to which generation they belong or, what comes to the same thing, the stage of civilization of their society. . . . The veil of ignorance is complete in these respects. Thus the persons in the original position are to ask themselves how much they would be willing to save at each stage of advance on the assumption that all generations are to save at the same rates. That is, they are to consider their willingness to save at any given phase of civilization with the understanding that the rates they propose are to regulate the whole span of accumulation. In effect, then, they must choose a just savings principle that assigns an appropriate rate of accumulation to each level of advance. . . . Presumably, this rate changes depending on the state of society. Eventually, once just institutions are firmly established, the net accumulation required falls to zero. (Ibid., p. 287) Obviously, many issues remain that we must resolve should we take this Rawlsean turn, not the least of which is to settle the issue of whether the Rawlesean system can claim to provide actual rational priority to any procedure, policy or decision. I will make the assumption that it does. If so, then we also have an independent justificatory reason for entering into a state of quasi-imprisonment and drug withdrawal. This would be necessary for us to engage in a course of action whose likely result will be the extermination of an addict self. Doing so is the best thing for this population of selves. Even S2 would agree that this is so, were S2 behind the veil. Quite interestingly, taking into account the rights of selves is not nearly as difficult when addiction is present as doing so is when less mischievous selves are in play. For it becomes immediately obvious that drastic measures should be taken against persons who threaten the existence of entire populations. However, far less clear is what we should about persons who merely annoy the rest of us.

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5. Conclusion In this chapter, I have offered an avenue for the possibility and rationality of bundling. I have also claimed that my method overcomes Ainslie’s stated “negative side-effects” of bundling. I have not done this so much by offering a direct route whereby a person confronts the obvious impediments for bringing about a willful bundling of decisions, but by showing how those impediments are removed once self deception is lifted. If my method succeeds, I believe that it implies an important truth regarding Ainslie’s reservations concerning bundling. That truth is that attempts to bundle head-on as hyperbolic discounters will result in a psychological state that is troublesome. My formulation shows how we can change the psychological state. In the next chapter, I move on to discuss the moral responsibilities of agents that find themselves in situations we have described.

Six RESPONSIBILITY 1. Introduction In this chapter, I confront the issue of moral responsibility among agents as George Ainslie describes them. We will start with a brief overview of literature on the issue of moral responsibility that provides a key for the development of a theory of moral responsibility for non-unitary selves. The purpose of this exercise is to create a model of moral responsibility that permits the assignment of moral responsibility to persons with addictions, understood in hyperbolic discounting terms. We hold (and are justified in holding) a self responsible in light of what that self knows. Luckily, each self knows enough in order to be properly deemed responsible (for what the self does in light of having an addiction). I will defend the following two principles of “Ainsliean” Moral Responsibility: AMR1: If a self has reason to believe that its life is unacceptably poor, has identified the cause of this poverty, and believes that the self can do something to end that poverty, and fails to undertake it, that self is to blame. AMR2: If a self has overwhelming evidence that a particular strategy fails, and if that self is aware of that evidence, then the self is to blame for continuing to attempt that strategy. 2. The “Agent” in Question: Moral Dimensions To accommodate for the moral responsibility of Ainsliean agents (tempered by the account I gave of those agents in Chapter Three) is no easy task. If the literature on moral responsibility over unitary selves has proven thorny, then discerning the moral responsibility of non-unitary ones proves all the more problematic. Since the vast majority of literature on moral responsibility is written under the presupposition of unitary selves, if this discussion were to rely upon such work, then either a straightforward non-responsibility conclusion will result (which will be a serious contender), or that work will not apply to the issue at hand. Before I attempt to give an account of that responsibility, we should remind ourselves of the nature of the agent in question (the topic of Chapter Three), and to focus more strongly on those aspects of the agents that have moral significance.

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I start by noting that successive selves have preferences. If we are to take preference utilitarianism seriously, then one point of moral significance has been found. For the nature of successive selves appears to deprive us of what we require in the correct ascription of moral responsibility. Imagine a scenario in which a large group of citizens is unified under a chosen flag. Two of these citizens interest us. One is in Toledo and is planning to commit a murder. The other is in Spokane and is watching Masterpiece Theater. Let us assume that, if only the Spokane Television-watcher had made a phone call to the potential victim, that phone call would have sufficiently disrupted the potential victim’s daily routine such that it, accidentally, would have avoided being murdered (perhaps the call caused the potential victim to miss a bus). But, imagine further that the Spokane viewer has no awareness that any of these facts about the situation are true. The Spokane television-watcher never makes the call, and the Toledo planner is successful in carrying out the murder. Would we hold the Spokane television-watcher responsible for the killing in Toledo? No. Using Peter Strawson’s (1993) terminology, the Spokane television-viewer is not the proper recipient of “reactive attitudes.” We would not blame the viewer. While the “‘ought’ implies ‘can’” principle remains controversial, in this case, I am inclined to say that not only is the Spokane television-watcher not the proper recipient of morally reactive attitudes, but the property of moral wrongness does not apply either. The viewer is unquestionably not morally responsible for not preventing the murder. But as obvious as this case may be, the cases about which we tend to be troubled are not so simple. Imagine that the Spokane viewer knows the Toledo murderer and happens to remember that some weeks ago when the viewer last saw the would-be murderer, the would-be murderer appeared to be unstable. If the Spokane viewer remembers this now, ought he call the authorities in Toledo? This case admits of reasonable disagreement. My guess is that we would say that the Spokane viewer is still not morally responsible if he does not make the call. Even though we may regret that he did not, and we may regret that someone who was in a position to have good suspicions did not act upon those suspicions. I still think we would not cast blame. For the Spokane televisionwatcher was merely aware of mental instability, not of homicidal tendencies. I believe that the second case is more like responsibility for hyperbolic discounters. We are aware, sometimes painfully, that some motivational forces within us compete for our attention. But we do not always have an adequate grasp on the nature of these motivational forces. As long as we fail to have an adequate grasp on these forces, we are subject to the version of self deception I described in the previous chapter. Therefore, what I take to be critical in my exposition of responsibility among hyperbolic discounters is not merely responsibility simpliciter, but responsibility for self deception.

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What I want to do now is to survey some recent literature on selfdeception and moral responsibility—that of Ishtiyaque Haji (2001; 1997) and Neil Levy (2003; 2004), whose work directly connects with Alfred R Mele’s insights I explained earlier. From this survey (especially Levi’s work), I will create an account of moral responsibility for Ainsliean addicts. Note though that neither of the two considers a non-unitary self view (though Levy, 2003, praises Ainslie for his hyperbolic account). Haji (1997) rejects the possibility of moral responsibility attributed to any multiple self. So I will have work to do should I attempt to use their work in an attempt to account for responsibility among non-unitary selves. Before covering the survey, I want to quote a key insight on the issue of responsibility for self-deception that has been offered by Gary Watson: Hence, one who is defeated by appetite is more like a collaborationist than an unsuccessful freedom fighter. This explains why it can feel especially shameful; to one degree or another, it seems to compromise one’s integrity. A parallel point holds for addictions. For self-reflexive beings, the ambivalence of addiction is built into its mechanism: it enslaves by appeal, rather than by brute force. (1999, p. 7) Later on I will explain why I think this is especially important, but for now, I will say that what Watson is accurately diagnosing here is that when it comes to the case of addiction, our ascription of moral responsibility is justified. But our ascription of responsibility cannot be justified if the addict was, separate from its will, unable to resist addiction. The ascription is justified because the addict is a “collaborationist.” I will comment again on this later in greater detail. By way of reviewing the literature, I will begin with recent work by Haji on the ascription of blame to self-deceivers. His account of the ascription of blame is applied to both Mele’s view and the “intentional/contradiction” view. He claims that on the basis of his account of the permissibility of the ascription of blame, agents who are self-deceivers on the contradictory view are blameworthy. I will then discuss Levy’s work on self-deception and moral responsibility. Levy is concerned primarily with showing the moral results of Mele’s version of self-deception, claiming that ascribing blame for such selfdeception is an error on our part as ascribers. My purpose in discussing these two is twofold: First, I believe that their positions represent some of the strongest difficulties an account such as the one I suggest can face when it comes to the ascription of moral responsibility to Ainsliean agents. Second, I also suspect that these authors have provided helpful clues in constructing the basis of moral responsibility for such agents. So I will present the arguments and conclude the sections with my summary, in which I show the salient points of their discussions.

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THINKING ABOUT ADDICTION 3. Haji on Self-Deception and Blameworthiness

Haji (2001) is concerned with discovering what moral differences exist between an unfortunate deed performed by someone out of ignorance and one done out of self-deception. He begins by citing an earlier article (Haji, 1998) in which he offers an epistemic condition for the ascription of blameworthiness; one that requires a belief on the part of an agent in question to justifiably cast blame upon that agent: Blame1: An agent, s, is morally blameworthy for performing an action a, only if s has an occurent or dispositional belief, b, that a is wrong, and (ii) s performs a despite entertaining b and believes (at least dispositionally) that she is performing a. (Haji, 2001, p. 281) Using this condition, Haji sets out to explore its bearing on the alleged responsibility (blameworthiness) of the self-deceived. To this end, he considers two options: the traditional view of contradiction and intention, and Mele’s view that I have already discussed. The traditional view, articulated by Ruben Gur and Harold Sackheim (1979), and elucidated by George Quattrone and Amos Tversky (1984), proposes the following four necessary and sufficient conditions for being selfdeceived with respect to acquiring a belief that p: The individual holds two contradictory beliefs (p and –p). These two contradictory beliefs are held simultaneously. The individual is not aware of holding one of the beliefs (p or –p). The act that determines which belief is and which belief is not subject to awareness is a motivated act. (Haji, 2001, p. 284) To obtain such a set of conditions requires some sort of mental partitioning. Haji distinguishes between the conscious and the unconscious to describe this partitioning. His definitions are: Weakly Unconscious Desire: An agent’s desire d is a weakly unconscious desire if and only if s has d and s does not believe or know that s has d. Weakly unconscious belief: s’s belief that b is weakly unconscious if and only if s has b and s does not know or believe that she has b. Strongly unconscious desire: The desire of s’s d to a [belief b that p] is strongly unconscious if and only if s has d[b], d[b] is weakly unconscious, and apart from outside help or careful scrutiny, she cannot come to know or believe that she has d[b]. (Ibid.)

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He maintains that on his view, an agent can be morally blameworthy for performing an action that issues from unconscious beliefs and desires, regardless of how weakly or strongly unconscious they are. For as long as the desires in question are not externally overwhelming on the agent, responsibility is retained. When, for example, we do what appears to be a good deed only to realize later that we did it in order to harm another, we find ourselves morally to blame for having done it. That the motives were unconscious is irrelevant. As Haji puts it: The mere fact that, for instance, an agent is unaware of the correct belief (or desire) in light of which she does something does not serve to excuse in the ordinary way, and she may well be blameworthy for doing that thing. (Ibid., p. 285) An asymmetry is evident between cases of self-deception and simple ignorance when it comes to the ascription of blameworthiness. In cases of simple ignorance, no belief, unconscious or otherwise, exists upon which we can pin responsibility. Yet in the case of self-deception, because we are dealing with a mental partitioning view, the agent does hold such a belief. As we have already seen, none of this would be germane to a Mele-style treatment of self-deception, according to which there is no holding of a contradiction, and no intentional action of self-deception. Harkening back to Haji’s Blame1, we straightforwardly see that self-deceivers are not blameworthy for their self-deceptions, because only by virtue of held beliefs are we entitled to cast blame. Mele’s self-deceivers hold no such beliefs, so they are not blameworthy in the sense of Blame1 according to Haji. Although Haji deals with several objections to this result, one is especially noteworthy: Could the victim of Mele-style self-deception be responsible for the very thing that gets him off the hook—his ignorance? Haji considers the case of a scholar who decided to accept an offer to publish a work that is mediocre at best, self-deceptively believing that it is first rate. Knowing that this scholar has engaged in Mele style self-deception, is he to blame for having engaged in it in the first place? After all, good scholars should be able to judge their work against the backdrop of their community, and if he judged fairly, he would see that his work was not up to standard. Haji responds that the scholar is still not to blame for accepting the offer to publish, for he lacks a relevant belief with respect to the potentially published work in question. Because Mele-style forces have “kicked in,” he still does not hold the belief that the work in question is not good, so he is not to blame. Haji is silent about whether any blame is warranted in this situation, though he does concede that the scholar “could be to blame for certain things associated with his self-deception,” but that in:

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THINKING ABOUT ADDICTION other prototypical cases of self-deception . . . it would be difficult to support the judgment that the pertinent agent was blameworthy for failing to acquire the relevant “self-knowledge.” It would be unrealistic. (Ibid., p. 291)

Haji concludes by suggesting that Mele’s version of self-deception is superior to the “dual belief” model, since evidence for the existence of dual beliefs is dubious, and because, given the existence of Mele’s model, we no longer have explanatory need for a dual belief system. Haji (1997) has also discussed this same framework in the case of alleged multiple-selves. His claim is that the ascription of blame to such agents is also inaccurate. Under such views, one self usually does the good or evil deed, and others take the blame or praise. Therefore, we are in a position of ascribing credit to an agent who does not possess the relevant belief necessary to justifiably bear that praise or blame. 4. Neil Levy on Self-Deception and Moral Responsibility Levy (2004) comments on self-deception and responsibility in light of Mele’s work (1997; 2001). His starting point is to accept Mele’s claim that selfdeception does not require contradictory beliefs, and that it is not straightforwardly intentional. Also, he suspects that we may want to hold self-deceivers, of the type Mele describes, morally responsible anyway. He then articulates two requirements according to which a self-deceived agent is culpable for self-deception for either holding or acquiring a belief: (1) The subject matter of the belief is important, and (2) The [believer] is in some doubt about its truth. (Levy, 2004, p. 305) Levy dubbed these the “importance” and the “doubt” conditions. He justifies the need for (2) by positing the “identity problem”: We can be held responsible for self-deceptive beliefs only if we are, or might reasonably be expected to be aware, that we have such beliefs. We also need to be able to identify which of those beliefs are the ones that are (potentially) self-deceptive (2001, p. 307). The doubt in condition (1) gives self-deceived persons reason to believe that they have such beliefs in the first place. So we need (1) and (2). Having said this, finding cases of (1) and number (2) obtaining, and in which we would find not just self-deception but moral responsibility for that deception, would be difficult to imagine. Levy concurs with Mele’s recent work; he states that self-deception of the garden variety requires no contradiction, and no obvious form of intentionality. In the absence of these two, and left with Mele’s notion of “motivated” or “biased” belief, if such an agent is to be responsible for anything, it would be for acquiring a motivated and/or biased belief. Such an agent should not have undertaken to use these mechan-

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isms, but did so anyway. Levy points out it would only be sensible, given (2) above, to ascribe moral responsibility if the agent is, or might become, aware of such a need. But because the contradictory requirement has been dropped, we have no reason to presuppose that such an agent would be aware of the mechanisms that cause bias. Unlike Haji when Levy considers the contradictory position there is no other belief available, even unconsciously. So, as Levy puts it: I suggest that the continued insistence upon the responsibility of the selfdeceiver for particular episodes of self-deception stems from the residual grip of the contradictory belief requirement upon theorists of selfdeception. They have explicitly rejected the requirement, but it continues to inform their accounts despite this fact. (Ibid., p. 309) Levy (2003) explicitly applies his arguments about addiction to the case of alcoholism. He considers the case of an addict who is in a state of denial called a “type-one” addict. This type-one addict has engaged in the type of belief formation practices that Mele so aptly describes. Alcoholics compare themselves to other “real” alcoholics who are worse off than they are. They rationalize away evidence that points to the conclusion that they are alcoholic. In short, they intentionally and non-contradictorily deny that they are alcoholic, and in so doing are self-deceived. If this were the end of the story, then following Levy (2004), the alcoholic is not to blame for being an alcoholic. But Levy (2003) points out that those who are alcoholics are infrequently in such a blissfully ignorant state. Other persons usually clearly point to the alcoholic that they (the alcoholic) are alcoholics. Frequently, the personal lives of alcoholics are testimonies to the fact that something is wrong. Levy speculates that the alcoholic is in a good position to know which belief in question is the self-deceptive one. So, if it is true that we can ascribe blame to the type-one addict, and if Levy is right in claiming that such addicts usually have good reasons available to them to know that they are selfdeceived, then we are forced to admit that the Frankfurtian addict, the one who is driven away by the Aristotelian wind of the first-order whose desire is to consume an addictive drug, must not exist because blame is incompatible with lack of ability (Frankfurt, 1971, pp. 5–20). But we may see the following happen to the type-one addict. The typeone addict may find the evidence no longer possible to resist, admit to being an alcoholic, and seek help. In our world, that usually implies that the addict will end up in an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) group or with a counselor who encourages the addict to attend one. Now let us claim that the addict has traversed the gulf from being a type-one, who was self deceived, into a typetwo addict. It appears at this point that, from our standpoint as outsiders, this

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is real progress. The addict in question now has a better grasp of its situation, no longer appearing to be the self-deceived type one addict. The type-two addict is the addict of the sort found in AA, who admits that addiction has caused physiological changes in the body, and admits that to being “powerless over alcohol,” all the while taking responsibility for being an alcoholic. We must keep in mind the caveat of AA, for Levy claims that being an AA-type addict is the alternative, in our actual world, to living as a type-one addict. Levy claims that this addict is still like the type-one addict in one important respect: the type-two addict, like the type-one addict, is self-deceived. But whereas they were formerly deceived about whether they were an addict, they are now deceived about whether they are powerless. The social import of this claim, while not directly relevant to his paper, is worth noting. AA depends crucially upon what it calls the “twelve steps,” one of which claims that the alcoholic is “powerless over alcohol.” If Levy is right, then one of the leading therapies for persons with addiction to alcohol only succeeds by swapping one form of self-deception for another. Provided that mental wellness ought to favor the truth, AA fails to provide for total mental wellness. Because self-deception for Levy is an instance of motivated, biased (false) belief, the self-deception of the type-two addict must be motivated. His suggestion is that by accepting the proposition that they (the alcoholic) are powerless over alcohol, the addict finds it easier to repudiate its desire for the drug. According to Levy, drug addiction functions the way Watson puts it in the opening section of this chapter. It is a case of willful seduction. But were we to come to believe that we were willingly seduced, we would have stumbled upon an occasion fit for deep embarrassment or shame. So, believing that our appetites are overwhelmed is a highly useful form of self-deception for those addicts who desire to follow AA methodologies, and who also do not wish to view themselves as accomplices in their own demise. Some social factors increase the likelihood that type-two addicts will fail to eschew their self-deception. Type-two addicts, as it happens, are told that denying their powerlessness over alcohol is the first step to relapse. The alcoholic is told that denying complete powerlessness is itself self-deception. In short, alcoholics are told, by the very support groups that promise them hope, that to abandon the new “type-two” view of themselves (a view which is false) would be to engage in self-deception and, quite likely, relapse. The alcoholic is effectively strong-armed into self-deception at a time when the alcoholic is weakest. An AA advocate might present an objection at this point, asserting that the position of AA is that persons are powerless individually and that, as an active member of an AA group who is “working” the AA program, an individual becomes empowered. The power comes from the group. To the extent that the group bestows power, the alcoholic has power over alcoholism. Stated another way, the claim that alcoholics do not have power over alcohol

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is actually just the claim that alcoholics fail to have power over alcohol on their own. Such a response is sophistry, and it might not even be consistent with AA doctrine. For when an active AA member relapses, no matter how active they were, the AA proponent claims that the relapse was attributable to not being a faithful AA member. For example, some AA group leaders commonly relapse into drinking. But it strains credulity to assert that such persons were not sufficiently attentive to the AA model. This response, then, is a poor one that appears more intent upon preserving the integrity of the AA model than on explaining the relapse. At no point in the life of a bonafide alcoholic, according to AA, does that alcoholic cease being an alcoholic. This implies that at no point does the alcoholic cease being powerless over alcohol. So, the claim that power is conferred by group membership appears to be but mythology, at least on AA’s own terms. Granted that the imagined objection above is unsatisfactory, we are now in a somewhat awkward position. The addict is told that they must accept that they are powerless over the drug, and at the same time accept that believing the truth of this proposition will help achieve sobriety. Levy points out that this appears a remarkably effective strategy to justify relapses. If one is absolutely powerless, then of what use would resistance to urges be whenever those urges are present? But this is not the end of the matter for Levy. Levy goes on to accuse those who endorse the concept of type two addiction of being morally blameworthy victims of self-deception themselves. He writes: [belief in type-two addicts] is certainly an obstacle to addressing the real social problems to which excessive consumption is a response . . . . It prevents the individual from perceiving the role that excessive consumption plays in her life, by encouraging her to believe that it is not her at all. It encourages us as a society to spend more money on medical research than on poverty alleviation . . . . It is a useful self-deception, perhaps, for those who are not its victims, because it is cheap for society (in the short-term at least), and it encourages us to look away from real social problems . . . . To the extent to which we propagate this myth . . . it is we who are self-deceived. Those who we are pleased to call addicts suffer as a result, and so do we. (2003, pp. 140–141) Levy’s claims are open to multiple interpretations. On one hand, he might be claiming that type-two addiction guarantees further addictions. On the other hand, he might be claiming that the insistence by non-addicts upon the existence of type-two addiction is an instance of blameworthy self-deception. I believe that the first interpretation has quite a bit of plausibility. Given the manner in which Levy describes the self-deception of type-two addicts,

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his view appears to be a “contradictories” view of self-deception. Perhaps we should understand his point this way: When a type one addict is motivated to cease being a type one addict (cease “denial”), a contingent fact the addict must face is that type two is the only one that remains available (or that the addict believes is available). Because the addict does not want to be a type-one addict, it is motivated to believe that it is powerless and acquires the corresponding motivationally biased belief. For acquiring these beliefs is believed by the former type-one addict to be the only open option. Unfortunately for this new type-two addict, this motivationally biased belief, acquired with the “intention” of abandoning the addiction, may inadvertently cause the addict to fall back into it again. For at any moment the addict feels temptation, it takes itself to be unable to resist. But I strongly disagree with the second interpretation. It appears to me that even if Levy’s salient point concerning the difference between the two sorts of addicts is sound, and even if he is right in claiming that both are cases of self-deception, it still does not follow that we should blame non-addicts for believing that type-two characteristics are true (such as the characteristic of being powerless). The group of people to whom Levy expresses his condemnation are, by and large, non-addicts, who are making the best of what they have. They are people who cannot imagine what it might be like to have lived with an addiction, done the irrational things we know some addicts to do, and so on. The belief on the part of non-addicts that type-two addiction accurately describes the situation of some addicts could be misguided rational benevolence. Following the examples used throughout this book, they are like S1’s attempting to make sense of S2-type behavior. Non-addicts take themselves to be portraying addicts positively by depriving addicts of power over their actions, not negatively. The “principle of charity” runs deep not just in philosophy, but in the creation of social policy and in other endeavors, applying to not only the construal of opponent’s arguments, but also to the evaluation of people’s behaviors. All things equal, we ought to assume the decency of persons. In the case of addictions, when we observe people engaging in a repeated series of actions that serve to destroy their lives, it can, at least prima facie, appear more charitable to conclude that the persons in question had no control over their actions. Coming to this conclusion appears to permit us to have a more positive view of the persons’ moral character because we conclude that they were not doing these things intentionally. As bad as that line of reasoning may be, and as false as it might be in some cases, it is not a case of conspiracy or of ill will. I do not doubt that our public policy has taken some wrong turns, such as the slogan of “Just say ‘No,’” but the implication of conspiracy is unwarranted. For that matter, if we as the “rational members” of society are selfdeceived in thinking that there are type two addicts, I do not see how we can be held responsible, under Levy’s view, for that self-deception. Undoubtedly,

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this is a crucial case. But we have no reason to believe that policy makers are in doubt concerning the truth of whether addicts are potent. It appears to be current prevailing wisdom, probably due to the vestiges of the now crumbling “disease theory,” that by definition, addicts (and, by extension, alcoholics) are powerless. As bad and as empirically false as this view may be, it is the prevailing view and thinking among many policy-makers. Levy does capture a significant important motive in his explanation that the addict may adopt this type of self-deception because of the shame involved in admitting that they had been “collaborators” in their demise. Although such beliefs are false, they are useful because if we can deny that addicts knowingly engaged in their addictions, then the matter is not so embarrassing. Doubt plays a crucial role in Levy’s view. Presumably, an addict is not to blame as long as there is no doubt. We do see blissfully unaware addicts and addicts-in-training. Once doubt creeps in (via mounting external evidence), moral ascription of blame becomes possible. 5. Ainsliean Moral Responsibility: A Proposal We have two views concerning the nature of moral responsibility, both of which bear strong family resemblance to Mele’s approach to self-deception. Haji’s view ascribes blame or praise on the basis of some relevant belief, however unconscious, of the agent in question. Levy ascribes it on the basis of doubt together with importance. I will now explore a new view, one in which I will attempt to identify the thing for which an Ainsliean addict may be responsible. My model will attempt to accommodate both of these insights. I claim that an addict is responsible should they do nothing about an acknowledged problem and that the addict is responsible should they attempt to rectify that problem in a manner for which ample inductive evidence exists which attests to its likely failure. Let us set up the logical framework for the problem. As in previous chapters, we will say that S2 is a chronic-drug-using-self and S1 is a more reasonable self. We will further assume that historically, there have been two stages in this entity’s epistemic saga. At Stage 1, the overall bundle of persons resembled a type one addict in Levy’s terms (though with my account of self deception applying). At Stage 2 the overall bundle of persons has become aware of the self deception, and may or may not have honestly dealt with the problem. Let us further assume that with respect to societal moral blame, we are considering imprisoning the “bundle” for some crimes that the bundle committed crimes that are somehow the direct “spring” from the addictive agency. If it is true, following Haji, that persons can only be held morally responsible in light of some belief they have, then at Stage 1, whether either S1 or S2 merit blame is not immediately apparent. Note that this is the opposite of what Haji has claimed, for in Haji’s view, the fact of a contradiction is what justifies us in ascribing blame. Whether the blame-sticking belief is conscious,

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unconscious, or deeply unconscious does not matter. All that does matter to Haji is that it is somehow available, whether immediately or mediately. However, whether the two contradictory beliefs are available to any single self is questionable. For S1 believes that he had good reason for drinking, and so does S2. The only difference between the two, according to my account, is that S1 is self-deceived in so believing, and S2 is not. Nowhere in my account is there a single self that is “holding a contradiction.” The self that is deceived is a self that has made a simple, and quite understandable, mistake. Those scholars who have dared to articulate a non-unitary self-view, however meager, have intentionally used it to explain the phenomenon of self-deception. But unlike Donald Davidson (1985), I am not ready to lay blame on the divided self in question. I am willing to grant, with Haji, that something further is needed than the mere failure to perform a logical activity. The logical activity that ought to be done, according to Davidson, is the conjoining of two propositions. I, however, maintain that a further belief is required. So far, putting the addict in jail, or in any way casting blame or dispensing punishment or praise, appears to be unjustifiable. Levy (2003), however, has offered an important concession. He has pointed out that type one addicts are fictions, who are morally responsible for their self-deception. Levy writes: Is the type-one addict responsible for her self-deception? I suggest that the self-deceived are often, perhaps usually, not responsible for their state because there is no reason to suspect them of knowing that they are the victims of biased belief formation processes and because they frequently have no way to identify which beliefs might be the result of selfdeception. However, type-one addicts do not have these excuses. Very often, they will have good reason to suspect that they are addicted. Indeed, often their problem is pointed out to them in no uncertain terms. Thus, they know exactly which of their beliefs are potentially selfdeceptive, and are in a good position to evaluate them for coherence and plausibility . . . there will come a time at which the attribution of responsibility will become appropriate. (Ibid., pp. 136–137) Recall that for Levy to say that the attribution of responsibility is appropriate is shorthand for saying that the matter in which we hold the agent in question responsible is a crucial one, and that (at the same time) the agent has doubt. This observation appears correct to me and I conclude that the Frankfurtian addict, while possible for a short time, is not possible for the addict who is in a state of continual addictive craving followed by a series of selfdefeating choices that are believed by the addict to be self-defeating. The losses they incur to their personal lives, the loneliness and estrangement, the sheer hopelessness that addicts ubiquitously describe is an insurmountable mountain of evidence that points out to the addict “something is wrong.” It

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appears correct, as Levy asserts, to say that the addict probably sees the problem as more than a mere “something” wrong, but also has some clue that the thing that is wrong is the agent’s affair with substances. However, I will not assume that this second point is necessarily present in the addict’s understanding. I will merely assume that the addict is in a great position to know that something is amiss, and that whatever that thing is, it is related to the substance use. As Levy describes it, the addict is aware that this vague “something” is doubt. Still that doubt may or may not be about addiction. The agent in question may not even have the “addiction concept” available. All that the addict knows is that life is not going very well, even by his or her own standards, and that making life better may require altering the usage of the substance. From this point, we see reasonable steps taken by addicts. The alcoholic may notice, for example, that other people whose lives are going well have a drink, but only occasionally. So, attempting moderation may appear to be a reasonably good idea. This choice frequently turns out to be an utterly ineffective strategy for addicts whose body-chemistry are prone to desire the excess. Moving away from the cases of chemical addictions, if such a thing as “relationship” addiction exists, then it would also likely turn out that attempting to see the person who is the object of that addiction only infrequently would also be a strategy doomed to failure. Although addicts may frequently attempt moderation, that strategy, in far too many cases, is unsuccessful. After many attempts the agent must admit there is something wrong with their approach to dealing with their problem. What we are presented with now, at this stage of the story, is an addict in the process of transitioning from a type one addict to a type two addict. Necessarily, that transition, by virtue of the ways in which this story is laid out, requires the agent to come to believe that it is a substance abuser. What this implies is that the agent (S1) must conclude that things must change. Here is the first point of Ainsliean moral responsibility for addicts: AMR1: If a self has reason to believe that its life is unacceptably poor, and has identified the cause of this poverty, and believes that there is something can be done to end that poverty, and fails to undertake it, that self is to blame. Returning to moderation, if the self in question were not to undertake to engage in moderation, that self is morally to blame for not attempting to do so. True, the agent will try and fail, but not trying is morally blameworthy. We can be assured that the addict in question will fail. The addict may think that it did not try hard enough, or was not careful enough about how, where, when, and with whom moderate drinking was to occur. But again, attempting these newly modified strategies will also fail. What occurs in unsuccessful attempts to cut down on usage has a positive epistemic effect, the

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effect of evidence gathering. The fact of failing lends evidence to the belief that the tactic is wrong in the first place. We have a second moral principle, which is consistent with Mele via Haji and Levy: AMR2: If a self has overwhelming evidence available that a particular strategy fails, and if that self is aware of that evidence, then the self is to blame for continuing to attempt that strategy. I will not fret over what, exactly, constitutes “overwhelming” in this case. All I need to point out is that if anyone has such evidence, surely the addict does. For addicts, as opposed to mere abusers (using DSM-IV terminology), in virtue of being addicts, suffer repeated defeats of their precommitment devices, however ingenious they may be. Furthermore, just what constitutes failure may not, in each case, be obvious. However, for the sake of theoretical simplicity, I will assume that whatever failure amounts to, it would include cases in which following a particular strategy led to far less than expected utility. To see what is at stake according to AMR2, consider a modified Ulysses case, in which Ulysses routinely passes by the sirens after his day at work as he takes the communal boat to his home island. But the Sirens do not bid him to stay on their island. Instead, they bid him to commit acts of homicide against those on his ship. So, when Ulysses falls victim to the Siren’s song, he slaughters all who are on board with him. Continued attempts at moderation would be akin (though not as drastic, let us hope) to Ulysses’ continued unsuccessful attempts to drown out the music through strength of will, at risk of the slaughter of his shipmates. If he repeatedly attempts to drown out the music, and fails repeatedly, he is morally to blame for attempting. What we would all hope for is that Ulysses was to take the boat home that goes the long way. In this is a case of addiction, we can expect that addicts may undertake many reasonable attempts and that they will all fail. This condition calls for drastic measures. Eventually the self in question will doubt whether anything it could do would be successful in rehabilitation. To presuppose, together with AA, that addicts might conclude they are powerless over their addiction is an alluring picture. I concur with Levy’s depiction of the dishonesty of this position, but only regarding the trivial fact that there exist other pre-commitment devices to which a person could avail that are not apparent to most people. One such device is ensuring that the agent is locked up, whether in jail (a remarkably unsuccessful way to give up an addiction) or, preferably, an inpatient addiction rehabilitation facility. So, then, what I have outlined here are those things for which individual selves within a bundle can be held responsible, from the point of utter

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denial, through the process of unsuccessful attempts, and resulting in, perhaps, recovery. I should add a few words about the language in the above section. So far, I have spoken of “moral responsibility.” However, by this phrase, I intend no specific course of action on the part of those who impart blame. Nothing I have said makes it true that there exists a single person who manages to accurately blame an addict. An addict may truly bear blame without anyone knowing, or believing, that the addict does. This is, I believe, as it should be. For the principles that I offer only apply relative to what the addicts themselves believe, not to what is true of them regardless of what they believe. To claim that an agent is only properly the recipient of blame when some other agent is capable of correctly identifying a belief that the agent in question has would be to require average persons to be skilled forensic psychiatrists. Obviously, that demand is too strong. I suspect that the only useful sort of blame that an addict can incur is constructive self-blame. For a central fault of addictive lifestyles is not so much in the consequences that such lifestyles have upon others, but on the self-destructive and self-thwarting nature of such lives. To engage in an addictive lifestyle for the purpose of attaining happiness, security, and well being, is akin to taking a taxi along the route of a marathon. True, such a person can claim that they traveled the route that every runner traveled, but there is something disingenuous about their claim. Runners would never take seriously the claim that the person completed the marathon, and we suspect that the person in question ought to give up the claim. If a person, like our taxi-rider, manages to use addictive substances only to the end of achieving happiness, and succeeds only in achieving that end without any serious negative consequences, then the principles I offer do not succeed in casting blame. For such persons are content with the sort of happiness that they have incurred, feel no residual negative consequences as a result of their tactic, and therefore have no evidence that their method toward accruing happiness is in any way defective. If our taxi-rider feels completely content in bragging about its performance in the 10k run, then, while we as spectators might greet such sentiments with incredulity, nothing in the principles that I offer warrants blame. This result will not be the case in most instances of addiction. As Levy has pointed out, many addicts are not in such a blissful state because they are often told in direct terms that their state is not blissful. At least some of these assertions by others would resonate with the addict. These types of addicts, which I suspect are numerous, have begun to cull evidence that their strategies to attain happiness are defective. We must address another problem, though, with AMR1 and AMR2. AMR1 and AMR2 are invoked under conditions of bias and self deception. But I have stated that they are, to use the term loosely, invoked “objectively.” I intend for them to apply relative to what is the case, not relative to what is

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believed to be the case. But it does still appear possible that AMR1 and AMR2 can themselves be invoked self-deceptively, with bias, or falsely. For example, I once observed a woman who was the sole heiress of a considerable amount of wealth. During her retirement years, she began the process of spending her wealth. She took many expensive trips and bought only the most expensive of wines and champagnes. Her children stated that they came to believe that she was buying too much alcohol and that she had become a problem drinker. After repeated conversations with her children and a planned intervention, the woman voluntarily entered inpatient treatment, believing that she had a problem with alcohol. But she did not. Apparently, her children’s efforts to have their mother committed for treatment were far more influenced by their desire to preserve the inheritance than by their benevolent concern for her well-being. In this case, at the time of entrance into treatment, the woman apparently had reason to believe that her life was unacceptably poor, and furthermore, that her drinking was a cause of this poverty. She also believed that she could do something to end this impoverishment of the quality of her life—to stop drinking—but it was not true that her life was impoverished or that she was addicted to alcohol. These types of cases appear to present my principle with a “false positive.” But I do not believe that these false positives threaten the principles I am defending. First, I should point out that the woman in this case discovered this truth. After learning about addictions and reflecting on her life, she realized the truth and was able to successfully complete her treatment with the help of professionals. I assume that she resumed enjoying expensive wines. Secondly, it is no threat to these principles to claim that an agent might falsely believe that they apply, whether under conditions of self deception or biased belief formation practices. If an agent comes to believe, whether truly or falsely, that its life is impoverished, we would expect the agent to do something about it, provided that it perceives a means by which it is able to do something about it. In cases where the belief is false, but the agent acts upon it and takes measures to change its life, our reaction is not one so much of disapproval, but of pity. For we understand that agents are only reasonable in attempting to correct a perceived problem. But we also know that their actions are adjunct, for no actual problem to be corrected exists. Therefore, to claim that these principles might require a person to perform actions that, in hindsight, might be unnecessary or based upon falsities, is not a strong objection. The claim that personal moral obligations can only be present under conditions of known truths might render nonsensical the notion of personal obligations for agents with less than omniscience. Also, this is why AMR2 in no way specifies the correct course of action, given that a previous course of action has been abandoned. I imagine that an addict might abandon one failed strategy in favor of another strategy that is

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equally doomed to failure. This process may happen repeatedly. For what I desire to focus on is not the correct or efficacious course of action, but upon whether or not the agent tries some new course of action for the reason that a previous course has proven ineffective. In the extreme, an addict might indefinitely attempt failed strategies. But I also suspect that learning will occur at some point during the process, helping the addict to judge which new course of action is best, and which worse. However, I have not detailed here the process of learning, and will not attempt to do so, while admitting that this is likely an important source of personal improvement. 6. Implications I wish to underscore several implications of this view of moral responsibility for Ainsliean agents. One is that the agent who has not yet judged itself to be an addict, who has not yet gathered enough evidence to suspect so, is not morally to blame. This is not only correct, but appears to cohere with our moral intuitions on such cases. I take it to be true that most persons in our society do not have a clear understanding of the concept “addiction,” much less the philosophical nuances of “coercion” and “control.” We would not want to hold “regular” persons responsible for not knowing them, and we would not want to hold truly unsuspecting victims of them responsible for not knowing them either. Following Haji, we hold people responsible for beliefs they hold. Another implication is that agents come in and out of a state of meriting praise and blame. When an agent first acknowledges addiction, and attempts to take reasonable steps such as moderation, that agent is to be praised, even if we know of a high probability of failure. The addict is holding up its end of the bargain, so to speak, doing its best with what it has. But when evidence accumulates for that agent, we come to believe that the addict “should know better” than to continue to maintain attempts at moderation. Should the addict continue, we blame the addict for the (descriptively identical) actions that we once praised. The difference is the evidence available to the addict. Another implication is that no one is responsible for being an addict. What people are responsible for is what they do in light of the fact that they are addicts. To cast blame on persons because they are addicted to alcohol or cocaine is not proper. But it would be proper to cast blame, were such a person both aware of his or her problem, and at the same time, did not do anything about it. Our reactive attitudes would be justified because they are based upon true moral principles. Granted, this implication might result in exactly the same behavior on the part of we who praise or blame the addict in question, but the point here is that our motivation for doing so would be entirely different. Yet one more implication is that on the view of responsibility presented, S1 is responsible for the behavior of S2. This is so because although S1 is not doing the deeds of S2, were S1 to violate any the principles generated above

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in my account of moral responsibility, then S1 would be knowingly granting S2 the opportunity to wreak havoc. If punishing bartenders for serving alcohol to drunken customers is justifiable, then to punish S1 for giving S2 the keys is similarly justifiable. We see the emergence of moral responsibility much more akin to the responsibility that some claim governments or CEOs have. While the issue of corporate responsibility may be contentious, perhaps a multiple self-view such as the one under consideration here may serve to alleviate that contention. On my view, the self in control is the one that bears the brunt of responsibility, both for the actions he does, the actions he knowingly permits others to do, end even those actions that he should have known about. AMR1 and AMR2 have some interesting implications when used in multiple-selves contexts. Straightforwardly, these principles apply to S1 quite well. For they address the requirement of such selves, who desire better lives, to act to obtain such lives. Again, such selves are responsible for doing something in light of their belief that their life is unacceptably poor. They are responsible (wrong) for attempting a failed strategy. What these principles do, then, is to drive S1s to uncover the self deception in which they have been engaged. For to be subject to an addiction in the manner treated in this thesis, and to attempt to come out with the normative upper-hand vis-à-vis AMR1 and AMR2, recognizing self deception would be essential. So, adhering to AMR1 and AMR2 requires that persons face (become aware of) self deception. If these principles (AMR1 and AMR2) apply to all selves, they would also apply to S2s, unless we were to arbitrarily limit the scope of the AMR’s to only S1s. What I should note is that, given the kinds of things that S2 values, S2 has already been following both AMR1 and AMR2. For following AMR1, they may have begun using addictive substances due to the belief that they needed some new kind of experience in their lives to, say, alleviate boredom, or pain. Moreover, S2 is also following AMR2, at least in the early stages of addiction. For early on in addiction, the strategy might have been “use substance x when at parties, and only in quantity n.” But once toleration and reinforcement kick in, this strategy for maximizing utility becomes impotent. Thus, following AMR2, a new strategy might be employed by S2: “Use substance x when at parties and occasionally at home, and only in quantity n+1.” S2, consistently following AMR2, has gained the normative stamp of approval by increasing usage, not by decreasing it. As odd as this result might appear, I doubt that it is as threatening to the integrity of my model as it might appear. For in the early stages of addiction, when neither S1 nor S2 have reason to believe that the addictive usage is causing their lives to be unacceptably poor, neither of them satisfy the conditions for responsibility under AMR1. In the later stages, for any S, including S2, to increase consumption to satisfy AMR2 can become literally impossible. For the agent’s bodies, bank accounts, or life circumstances, might make such an option impossible. In such a case, were the agent to attempt to in-

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crease usage, they would be attempting to do so with evidence that doing so would be impossible, and that is a violation of AMR2, not an adherence to it. As an aside, note that if AMR1 and AMR2 are extended beyond cases of addictive agency into social realms, the result would be to require a strong form of social involvement. In the case of perennial racial injustices, for example, we seem to have culled ample empirical data that some portions of American public policy have proved ineffective in correcting inequalities. I assume that this would be true in other countries also. My principles may require bold revision of policy in light of that evidence. This is not a result that I will resist. However, I will point out that the case of the creation of public policy will not be as simple as the case of personal policy. Applying my principles to public policy and, therefore, social engagement, will require a diagnosis of what we collectively believe, a method for acting in cases where no single collective belief exists (which will likely be every case of proposed collective belief), and an ascription of praise and blame in light of it. In short, it would require a consistent socio-political philosophy. I will not attempt to provide that here. 7. Conclusion Addicts are morally responsible, but not morally responsible for being addicts. They are morally responsible for what, in light of their well-supported belief that they are addicts, they do or do not do. They are not morally responsible should they fail to overcome their addictions. Instead, they are morally responsible should they fail to try appropriate methods of doing so. Granted some of these methods might be extreme, and some will undoubtedly fail, but I maintain hope that one will be successful.

Seven RESPONSIBILITY IN A REDUCTIONIST MODEL George Ainslie 1. Introduction Philosophical approaches to volition and responsibility have often analyzed psychological models, but have not started with radically reductionistic theories. Craig Hanson has begun with my derivation of higher mental processes from basic motivational data and has related it to the corresponding issues in philosophy, thereby revealing the relevance of the two approaches to each other and the differences in their conventions of analysis. The goal of philosophy has been to distinguish rational choice from irrational, which has entailed discerning binary choices in the disorderly field of experience: Perceptions are organized into propositions. Propositions are either true or not. A person either believes a proposition or not, is either free to act on its belief or not, and either does so or does not. The person is either the same person from time to time or not (not a trivial question; see Parfit, 1984, Tappolet, in press). These dichotomies frame rational choice as we have come to know it. This rationality is a formal structure, an accomplishment, not the basic process of choice. Motivational science uses a model in which alternative processes compete and are selected in a fashion that resembles evolution more than deduction. Its selective factor is best characterized as “reward,” that which increases the frequency of the processes it follows. The competition for selection as understood by behavioral psychology is based on the past occurrence of the selective factor(s) in similar situations. Behaviors are learned and retained to the extent that they produce these selective factors, and thereby come to include ways of foraging for these factors. From a selectionist view of foraging competitors, to rational choice as understood by philosophy, and less formally, by most educated people, is a great leap. In philosophy, judgments select motives, which is a sequence that behavioral psychology regards as lacking a causal foundation. In behavioral psychology, motives select judgments, a sequence that philosophy regards as the essence of self-deception. Philosophy proceeds from the top down, behavioral psychology from the bottom up. To reconcile these approaches, we must derive judging from the process of being motivated in such a way that

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judgments can cause and be caused within a framework that has clear motivational roots. This is the effort in which Hanson has joined me. Beginning with Thomas Hobbes, and reaching uncompromising expression in Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1912), a materialist strand of philosophy has moved toward reconciling reasons with mechanisms and the truth of propositions with the metabolism of brains. But mechanisms for this operation are missing at the philosophical level. Hanson has taken my proposal about the strategic interaction of hyperbolically discounted incentives and used it to give philosophic theory more operational detail. This is an ambitious project that appears to have partially succeeded, but also looks, to the eye of a non-philosopher, to be limited by some lingering binary categories. His goal is a natural test for moral responsibility, to determine whether an addict is blameworthy. His test depends on whether the addict believes some propositions, given that the person is truly addicted—unfree—and not merely tempted. The addict’s beliefs cause and depend on the relationship of discrete successive selves. Hanson has elaborated an approach to a subtle moral problem from the elementary motivational discount curve that people share with rats and pigeons. I am impressed by his adaptation of my method and believe it will be useful in addressing many other problems in the philosophy of mind. At the same time, I will argue that we cannot find a natural test for moral responsibility, neither can we find lines between addiction and temptation or between belief and volition. To make good use of this chapter, I will not review our many areas of agreement, but zero in on the points where our interpretations diverge. By now, picoeconomics is an open field, but in this chapter, I will give my interpretation of the issues of the divided self, self-deception, responsibility, and blame. 2. How Are Selves Divided? Hanson gives a fine account of how hyperbolic discounting predicts akrasia and requires a mechanism such as intertemporal bargaining to be reconciled with rational choice. What such a mechanism predicts depends on how we define its intrapersonal agents. Here he changes my usage, which leads to some problems. In describing the divisions that hyperbolic discounting can be expected to motivate, he uses “selves” to mean not only what I call selves but also what I describe as interests (2001, pp. 42–44). This conflation leads Hanson to describe the conflict among selves as something more like dissociative disorder (Ainslie, 1999; Putnam, 1989) than simple intertemporal bargaining. I do not use “self” as a term of art, and mean no more by it than anyone else does. “Successive selves” is shorthand for “the self with successive motivational configurations,” so one person can have successive selves in the form of a hungry self and a satiated self, for instance. This is ordinary speech. What I have asserted is that a hardwired function that discounts expected rewards

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hyperbolically causes these motivational configurations to be inconsistent over time, creating incentives for individuals at one time to anticipate and react to their motives at another time. The ordinary concept of selfhood implicitly covers intertemporal conflicts and the means the person has learned to deal with these conflicts. I have further asserted that the partial nature of these conflicts (“limited warfare”) and the ways an individual can perceive them provide the theorist with all that is necessary to account for the familiar, imperfect, motivational unity of the self. Many faculties exist that do not shift when motivation shifts, such as the information and skills that the person has learned; these are transparent, or, in Hanson’s term, transitive. But many attributes we usually think to be innately unitary, including, as Hanson mentions (p. 40), Derek Parfit’s desires, goals, and character, do rest upon the potentially shifting foundation of motivation. The durable parties to these intertemporal conflicts are interests. I do use this term technically, and perhaps differently than a philosopher would—not just for contingencies of reward; an interest is the set of processes that have been shaped by (have been learned because they obtain) a kind of reward. “Kind” is not bounded—you could have a vanilla ice cream interest and a chocolate ice cream interest—but the term is useful only where the rewards will shift in relative value over time, creating an incentive for the processes that obtain one kind to include processes that interfere with getting the other kind: not vanilla versus chocolate, but perhaps an ice cream interest versus a dieting interest. Interests in disparate rewards may also make use of each other, as when an interest in dieting makes use of an interest in sports to increase food metabolism; this is the nature of the “alliance” to which Hanson refers in his list of the self’s attributes (#13, p. 34). In a bottom-up model interests are not just reasons to choose, but agents that vie for expression. I suspect that it was this difference in the use of “interest” that led Hanson to look for a different agent. But a self sounds like a greater agent than an interest, a whole or almost whole personality, a Siamese twin, no more than two of which could be imagined as existing at a given moment. We can easily slice a self into successive moments, just like a whole personality, but we are moved to endow synchronous selves with more ego functions than simple interests must have. Much of what Hanson subsequently discusses as fragmentary selves would be better described as interests. The “population of personalities” (p. 39) or “selves that must be created” (p. 38) would be less mysterious as interests that must be learned. When a person’s preference is alternately dominated by two robust interests, we could speak of it, as Hanson does, as having two selves, as in sober and drinking selves, without violence to the term (S1 and S2, pp. 34ff.); but successively dominant interests do not have the same motivational separateness as two autonomous selves would, because the reward that each obtains when it wins acts also on the other, partially compensating for the other’s loss of its goal.

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We have to assume that a person’s rewards are unitary, or integrated (Ainslie, 1992b, pp. 28–32; Cabanac, 1992; McFarland and Sibley, 1975; Montague and Berns, 2002; Shizgal and Conover, 1996). An interest is shaped by a recurring reward, which acts on all other interests to the extent that they have been recently active. Processes that happen to precede the reward but are causally unconnected with it will become part of that interest as long as the association persists. An interest overshadowed by a competing interest is still influenced by the reward obtained by the winning interest. Unless it becomes dominant at other times, it will merge with that interest and cease to function as a discrete interest. Interests may be easiest to picture in the context of Hanson’s complaint: “What these selves do while they are in the background is something of a mystery” (p. 36). Nondominant interests are not dormant, but look for opportunities for their reward, unless they have been forestalled from doing so (discussed presently). When the (whole) person has information about an opportunity for their kind of reward, interests bid for expression on the basis of the reward’s value, discounted for expected delay. Experientially, a person stays alert for opportunities for a particular kind of reward in the interest of getting it, and when the person spots one, weighs it against other opportunities (including “opportunities” for panic, intrusive memories, and other aversive experiences that reward only attention to them [Ainslie, 2001, pp. 54–61]). The crucial point is that selves under the successive domination of conflicting interests cannot be total enemies in the way that separate individuals can be. They share a common reward process, and by the very definition of reward always try to maximize the prospective activity of this process. To identify conflicting interests (or selves) is to recognize differently motivated agents, but this is not the clean separation that divides two individuals in their separate skins. Despite Derek Parfit’s recognition that a future self may have a variable amount of connectedness with the current self (1984, pp. 204–209), philosophers continue to debate whether a future self is (or can be) “mathematically identical” with the current self (Tappolet, 2009). To see the relationship as a dichotomy (identical or not) instead of a continuum is unnecessarily confining. Interests that stay in strategic conflict with one another must be based on rewards with different payoff times. This conflict is a function of the timing of their rewards in such a way that one interest is always more long-term than its competitor(s). If similarly timed rewards are mutually exclusive and close in size, they may remain in competition, but the person, when preferring one, will not increase the person’s prospective reward by forestalling a change to the other (unless the ambivalence per se is costly). Such rewards will not engender interests in any strategic sense. It is the conflict of larger later (LL) rewards with smaller, sooner (SS) ones that creates dynamic interests. Hanson’s concept of addict-selves (or interests) does not take this asymmetry into account. S2 on New Year’s Eve (p. 35) is dominated by a short-term interest in drinking that night only, and would lose instead of gain

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power by allying with future interests in drinking. Hyperbolic curves intrinsically assure that bundling will give long-term rewards leverage over shortterm rewards. (Ainslie and Monterosso, 2003a). This is why an addict will never be motivated to say “The addict self, after all, has every reason to bundle in the following way: I will always act in such a way as to use substances as much as possible on every day in which I am to choose” (p. 42). This is why bundling can create self-enforcing contracts that endure over successive motivational configurations without “the authority of the governor” that Hanson argues to be necessary (ibid.). When a drinking interest is in a close contest with the sobriety interest, it must secure dominance by distinguishing the present case from the relevant bundle, for example, “it’s only for New Year’s.” Once it has achieved dominance, I agree that the person will be motivated to forestall a change of choice back to sobriety, but only in the short run, until the person has either obtained or lost that particular SS reward. The prospect of drinking ever afterwards is what the sobriety interest invokes to deter any drinking at all. 3. Self-Deception In practical terms, hyperbolic discounting matters mostly because it defines the problem of impulsiveness and implies mechanisms for people’s familiar attempts at impulse control. As Hanson observes, self-deception is an integral part of these processes, almost always noticed in situations where subjects are tempted to do something that they see as unwise, or believe something that they know to be unrealistic. Hanson depicts hyphenated self-deception and de-hyphenated self deception as alternative hypotheses, but they may instead occur as alternative mechanisms, each operative in some cases. That is what hyperbolic discounting predicts: Several means exist by which a person can precommit future choices and each has vulnerabilities that a contrary interest can exploit. Two of these means involve belief and are potentially subject to self-deception. You can manipulate the information that you receive or process, and you can interpret present choices as precedents for a category of subsequent choices. Manipulating information, what I have called “attention control” (2001, pp. 76–77), can be undertaken deliberately to avoid temptations; but it also occurs inevitably when directing attention one way is rewarded more than directing it another. Experimental subjects have been found to preview new information before exploring it further (Shriffrin and Schneider, 1977), and the part first evaluated is apt to be its emotional meaning (Zajonc, 1980; Ochsner, 2005). Thousands of times a day you will mindlessly shy away from some avenues and pursue others, too quickly for these choices to be governed deliberately. You do the same thing with memories. As Richard Holton (2008) has pointed out, although to deliberately not think of the number 2 (or even the sum of 1 + 1) is impossible, not to think of the product of 345 x 27 is

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easy. Not to think of not thinking of it is also easy, so the choice can be insensible. People inevitably deceive themselves in that they deflect their future explorations and leave blind spots. This is just Freudian repression, but philosophy did not deal with the garden variety until Mele’s analysis (1987), probably because it does not fit the dichotomy of believing either p or not-p. The sensitivity of knowledge to this moment-to-moment deflection of attention means that Hanson’s assumed transitivity (transparency) can only be partial (p. 36). Some people have greater powers of limiting their attention than others do—a trait called “absorption,” a correlate of hypnotizability (Roche and McConkey, 1990). People who have great powers of absorption are apt to use it in their long-term interests, to avoid temptations, and in their short-term interests, to evade control. Whereas bundling is highly asymmetrical in favor of long-term interests, attention control is available equally to any interest, and is usually construed as serving impulses more than controls. Overuse may lead to the major failures of information-sharing such as that seen in dissociative disorders, where the self at one time (usually under the control of short-term interests) keeps information about its activities and even its existence from the self expected at another (Putnam, 1989). Dissociation is an extreme example of Davidsonian partitioning, but such partitioning involves more than the basic limited warfare phenomenon implied by hyperbolic curves, which can occur under conditions of perfect transitivity (transparency). The other committing device that involves belief is “will.” Will is sometimes thought to be a form of attention control, probably because attention control is integral to the moment-to-moment execution of intentions: You do not weigh each step of a plan as you carry it out. Several philosophers, including Michael Bratman (1999a), Edward McClennen (1990), and Holton (2008), have made not reconsidering plans a mechanism of will. William James famously said of the will not to drink, “The effort by which [a drunkard] succeeds in keeping the right name unwaveringly present to his mind proves to be his saving moral act” (1890, p. 565), seemingly suggesting that the will depends on attention control. However, he also said that in using will, “both alternatives are held steadily in view, and in the very act of murdering the vanquished possibility the chooser realizes how much in that instant he is making himself lose” (ibid., p. 534). Here James clearly recognized a process beyond selective awareness. To produce consistency over time, will must depend on more than attention. Attention is volatile; Even small choice points are apt to evoke the weighing process that the pioneering psychologist Edward Tolman (1939) called “vicarious trial and error” (VTE), leading to a reassessment of incentives (updated at the neural level by Adam Johnson and David Redish, 2007). Hypnosis, which broadly speaking operates by the direction of attention, is effective (in high-absorption subjects) against short-term urges such as pain and mannerisms (Spiegel and Spiegel, 1978), but has failed against longerlasting preferences such as addictions (Abbott, et al., 1998). Will is more than

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a plan to direct attention in particular ways; it is a commitment that can withstand conscious contrary motives. The bundling hypothesis of will has two components: that choosing a whole bundle of future choices at once increases patience, and that perceiving current choices as test cases for future ones has the effect of bundling them together. Increased patience when choices are bundled is a consequence of the leveling off of the declining value curves from delayed rewards as delays get greater, and has been demonstrated experimentally in human subjects (Kirby and Guastello, 2001) and rats (Ainslie and Monterosso, 2003a). This finding in nonhuman subjects indicates that the bundling effect is not just an artifact of culture. The hypothesis that perceiving test cases creates effective bundles is probably not testable by experiment because of the recursive nature of selfprediction. Here, a favorite device of philosophy of mind, the thought experiment, has been especially valuable. How can a person intend to drink a noxious liquid to win a prize, when the prize is just for the intending and the person believes that it would not be rational to actually drink the liquid after intending and winning (Kavka, 1983)? Or, how can Joe Mintoff’s farmer, who plans to move away before next year and knows he cannot lie convincingly, get neighbors to help with his harvest when he believes it would not then be rational to reciprocate (2004)? The answer in both cases is that it cannot be done without finding a way to genuinely believe that following your original intention is rational. Assuming rational to mean “reward-maximizing,” the only apparent solution is to discern a stake in maintaining the ongoing credibility to yourself of your resolutions or promises. If you knew that you would see not drinking or not reciprocating as failures in a test case of this credibility, then it would be rational to carry out your original intention in order to defend your stake, even though it no longer served your present purpose. Hanson apparently agrees with this demonstration, although he concludes that a person can eventually dispense with putting LL rewards at stake, an elaboration I will discuss shortly. The way that recursive self-prediction sets up (dehyphenated) self deception is inherent in the dependence of your expectation of future LL rewards on your current choice. If you can detach your present choice from all the important bundles that it belongs to— actually, from bundles that you expect you will judge it as having belonged to when you look back on this choice in the future—then you are free to act on its merits alone. Given a desire to stop smoking, would you smoke a cigarette today if it would not reduce your expectation of abstaining in the future? What reason would there be not to (Monterosso and Ainslie, 1999)? Accordingly, short-term interests are always looking for truce lines between them and your long-term interests, such that present indulgences are permissible. James’ drunkard comes up with these: It is a new brand of liquor which the interests of intellectual culture in such matters oblige him to test; moreover it is poured out and it is a sin

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But such proposals are hazardous, as James showed. Looking back on them, you are apt to say that you were deceiving yourself. Here is the second kind of self-deception, the kind without the hyphen. Self deception does not involve avoiding information, but Jesuitical negotiation with an opposing interest. It is not repression, it is rationalization. Hanson’s (dehyphenated) self deception is a form of rationalization, not repression; but he proposes an interesting converse of my interpretation of rationalization. In his model, the individual feels obliged to interpret past lapses as willed—not as lapses, but as legitimate choices within the bundle. By such an interpretation the individual corrupts the bundle so it motivates not self-control but resignation: “This is my fate” (p. 51). This is a deception of the self that prefers the LL rewards by the self in the previous state where that self preferred the SS. Such a deception results in uncontrolled consumption of SS rewards. Hanson suggests that the way to fix this state of affairs is for people to become aware of their hyperbolic discounting, so “they may surely reflect upon their past and decide that they cannot identify with it” (p. 64). The LL-preferring self (S1) can get a “divorce or separation” from the SS-preferring self (S2; p. 65). Then: while it may still be true that [the agent] bundles for the sake of the rule, it also bundles because doing so mirrors those things, which it has come to value. Among those new things it has come to value is valuating only on the basis of the preferences it has. (p. 66). Consequently, the person becomes stably rational: Intrapersonal warfare only takes place behind the scenes when “self deception” is successful… The addict is capable, by refusing to engage in self deception, of mirroring exponential curves” (ibid.). Recognizing hyperbolic discounting leads to bundling, as in my model, but with a cognitive mechanism rather than a prisoner’s dilemma-type threat: bundling behavior comes about because of the psychological incompatibility of becoming aware of self deception and employing those measures that promoted hyperbolic discounting (ibid.).

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This would plainly be a realization with radical consequences, an epiphany. However, I believe that Hanson has departed from the basic properties of reward and is depicting a second-order phenomenon. Hyperbolic discounting cannot be “promoted” or inhibited, because it is an elementary property of the reward process; otherwise it could not be observed in rats and pigeons. The potential to increase patience by bundling expected rewards must arise from this property, for the same reason. However, the formation of bundles by the perception of current choices as test cases lacks demonstration by experiments other than thought experiments; this is where alternative interpretations may be viable. Hanson suggests that bundling occurs not (only) because of intertemporal bargaining, but because an individual learns to choose “on the basis of the preferences he has,” by which I take him to mean long-term preferences, in the same sense that psychologists Bernheim and Rangel (2004) distinguish preferences from mere choices. In effect, short-term interests cease to be able to propose rationalizations that support expectation of both a present SS reward and future LL rewards at the same time. He imagines this change to occur because the choices of S2 are no longer seen as tests of S1’s preferences, as they had been when S1 was self deceived. But why this change does not leave S2 to run amok is not readily apparent. As Neil Levy remarks, “disavowal of one’s desires reduces one’s ability to exercise self-control with regard to them” (2003, p. 139). The problem may be that Hanson’s S2 has ceased to be a fleeting motivational state and has become a personality, such that he pictures it as capable of (or formed of) bundling present and future addictive choices, and potentially worthy of blame (“whether either S1 or S2 merit blame is not immediately apparent”; p. 85). S1 “has” interests (pp. 53–54). But in my usage of “selves,” S2 is merely the motivational state in which the individual prefers the addictive option. Successful bundling prevents the emergence of S2 at all. The interest in the addictive option succeeds only to the extent that it can find blind spots or rationalizations in the commitments set up by longer term interests. I believe that Hanson’s “divorce” of S2 still is a real phenomenon, but that it arises in the extreme case where efforts at impulse control have deteriorated through extensive rationalization. This deterioration is always a danger because of the unavoidable ambiguities in most criteria for personal rules, which are the truce lines of intertemporal bargaining. It is the factor that attenuates and often defeats willpower in addictions, not by overwhelming longterm interests, but by obscuring them. Hanson’s divorce describes an experience people have often identified at a turning point in this process. An individual realizes that the structure of rationalizations it has built up for some temptations is fatally undermining its plans, so the individual disowns it—counts all efforts at intertemporal bargaining as impulsive. In effect, the individual removes an S2’s ability to invoke the justification of preserving S1. This measure might appear to represent the abdication of responsibility of which Levy complained, but if we understand the words in the context of the rationalization

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problem, it is akin to Step One of every 12-step program: “I acknowledge that I am powerless over [the particular addictive lure].” James’ drunkard can no longer believe any of his excuses, because they all amount to “being a drunkard”—a single intertemporal bargain, overarching and unchangeable. Similarly, John Calvin is said to have inspired Protestant burghers to unprecedented feats of self-denial by proclaiming man’s powerlessness over sin—renouncing the attempt to overcome sin by effort (Weber, 1958). The apparently paradoxical increase in self-control after abandoning attempts at willpower arguably comes from forestalling the process of rationalization, leaving the expectation of getting the LL preferences naked against every temptation (see Monterosso and Ainslie, in press). Although Hanson is not entirely explicit, in saying the person bundles when she “mirrors” the things she values (p. 75), he appears to be saying that bundling happens when a person adds them up and opposes them to his addiction(s) without the arbitrage afforded by rationalization. If, in the words of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), “one drink is too many and a thousand are not enough” your choice at every point is to stay abstinent or face ruin. By a similar rationale, strategists of modern nations might be said to see themselves as powerless over the use of nuclear weapons—the very perception that has prevented their use. You cannot tell exactly how important you are making a test case—how big a bundle of your prospective reward will be at stake—but the distinction between a casual attempt at being neater and the atomic importance of continued sobriety is easy to make. A “divorce” that closes off negotiation is much more likely in the latter case. Hanson goes a step further when he claims that when an individual has come to “value . . . only on the basis of the preferences it has” (p. 66), he ceases to need the pit of Hell—or the loss of sobriety—yawning below to motivate impulse control. “The lapse would be a mere lapse. It would not change my utility function” (p. 68). Since the person is “mirroring” exponential discounting, rules are said to become unnecessary, and the compulsive side-effects that I have attributed to intertemporal bargaining do not occur. Hanson is not alone in this kind of interpretation. Howard Rachlin (1995) has written that the mere recognition of a larger pattern of reward is sufficient to make breaches of the pattern unattractive. Rational choice theory implies that people require only insight into the true contingencies of reward to avoid impulses (Sugden, 1991), and even some theologians have denied a basic tendency to sin (Bernstein, 1953). But as basic motivational mechanisms, all these proposals defy some equivalent of the law of gravity. If insight alone could make a person choose LL alternatives, surely sophisticated people would be immune to the cycle of temptation and regret. If awareness of best interests could displace impulses, then realizing a desire to be thin would prevent the urge to overeat. Stated mechanistically, if a person could learn to bend its basic discount curve so as to discount less steeply, that person would have an incentive to do so that would have shaped its behavior from earliest

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childhood, since it would make all of its prospective rewards more valuable (see Logue, 1988, and my commentary that follows it, Ainslie, 1988). Hanson aspires to a theory of will in which bundling does not predispose people to compulsive traits (as in a Kantian “passionless deontology”; p. 25). However, the intertemporal bargaining mechanism that keeps a commitment to bundle your choices from being magical thinking (Bratman’s worry, 1999a; Hanson’s p. 60) necessarily predisposes to compulsions, and compulsions with exactly the predicted properties are frequently observed. 4. Responsibility Despite our differences in conceiving the division of agency, Hanson and I agree on this basic interpretation: When a short-term interest undermines long-term interests by self-deception—distorting either the gathering of information or the interpretation of test cases—akrasia results. When do we say that the person as a whole is responsible? Any reductionistic theory is open to the criticism that causation by mechanisms is incompatible with personal responsibility. Hanson touches this point only tangentially, but an essential element of responsibility is your freedom to have done otherwise. I have argued elsewhere that the strength and the experienced freedom of the will can be traced to recursive self-prediction, which is in turn a product of hyperbolic discounting in self-aware individuals (2001). Issues of strength and freedom are integral to the moral responsibility of addicts. As I have just discussed, Hanson’s proposal that an end to self deception will make recursive self-prediction unnecessary to strength of will appears overly optimistic. The self-prediction process is what makes the difference between a reasonable chance of sobriety and captivity by impulses. Recursive selfprediction also reconciles the experiential properties of free will with strict determinism, a solution that protects the notion of responsibility from attack on a determinist basis, as I will now briefly argue. Free will may well have been the most provocative topic in the history of philosophy, which includes that of philosophy’s late-blooming offspring, psychology. The reason is not only the apparent irreconcilability of two fundamental beliefs about the world—that all events are caused versus that human choice is a function of more than just pre-existing incentives—but also the pressing need for a rational way to assign blame, the main sanction in interpersonal and, arguably, intrapersonal behavior control. This need has been especially glaring in the case of addiction, a word that means enslavement but which is applied to behaviors that appear to be chosen in the usual way, on the basis of expected differential reward. Blame depends on responsibility, and responsibility depends on freedom of the subject’s will, in the sense that subjects should not be blamed for choices they could not have made any other way. The compatibilism endorsed by many philosophers and most ordinary citizens (at least college students; Nahmias et.al., 2005) accepts both a strict

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chain of causality and personal responsibility, but its mechanisms have been problematic. I will not review these mechanisms, but will instead suggest one that makes blame and responsibility consistent with a radically reductionist view of human choice. Radical reductionism holds that all choices are traceable in principle to physical mechanisms, which act by creating motivation. The idea that most choice has some physical roots, or minimally roots alien to the self, has always been accepted. Galen of Pergamon spoke of passions as wild beasts that had to be tamed by a weaker “reason” (1963, p. 47). Francis Bacon envisioned self-government as a similar activity, to “set affection against affection, and to master one by another: even as we use to hunt beast with beast” (quoted by Hirschman, 1977, p. 22). The neurologist Paul MacLean (1990) has likened the role of the higher functions in the cortex in interaction with lower brain centers to a man riding a horse. These images always leave room at the top for a homunculus, an irreducible source of potentially uncaused initiative that comes to govern the stronger, lower functions by its greater art. An apt metaphor might be to imagine an ego as, say, a canoeist shooting the rapids, navigating among much stronger currents of motivation. But the task of the motivational reductionist is to derive the canoeist from the logic of the currents, and still make the picture consistent with human experience. The best mechanism suggested for incompatibilism has been that we cannot predict our own choices (for example, Dennett, 1984, pp. 101–152). Similarly, Richard Holton (2008) views the experience of freedom as occurring when “action is experienced as something that the agent instigates, rather than something that just happens to the agent as the result of the state that they were antecedently in.” An action is freely willed if it cannot be predicted from its antecedent states, especially the incentives that the agent faces. An agent’s sense of freedom would be undermined even if only it could predict its choice with certainty from knowing the incentives she faces. But in cases with strong motives and imminent, binary alternatives (to take a drink or not, for instance), what, aside from true indeterminacy, could prevent such introspective certainty? Indeterminacy at the subatomic level continues to be put forward as a mechanism. For instance, when physicist Gerard t’Hooft recently constructed a model in which subatomic activity is deterministic, another physicist, Antoine Suarez, retorted: “If t’Hooft is really correct then the work for which he is famed was not carried out as a result of his free will. Rather, he was destined to do it from the beginning of time. . . . Maybe his Nobel prize should rightfully have been presented to the big bang instead” (Merali, 2007). However, the random movement of particles translates into highly predictable averages at observable volumes. It matters little that some water molecules

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are always moving upstream, for instance., Subatomic inteterminacy is unlikely to produce a sense of efficacy at either micro or macro levels. Better to look within the decision process for the factor that obscures introspection. Within a deterministic model, complexity and temporal distance make prediction of anyone’s choices harder, but not impossible in principle; and some options chosen in a subjectively free way are neither complex nor remote. Could the factor responsible for introspective opacity be the same recursive self-prediction that explains strength of will? I have argued that the source of uncertainty about how you will make a decision comes not from indeterminacy but from a looser connection among successive motivational states than previous theories of mind have assumed (2001). Hyperbolic discounting implies that choices between SS and LL rewards can be expected to change over time in the absence of new information, and that the intervention that gets called “will” depends on the cooperation of successive motivational states within the person. This cooperation is effortful in that it entails vigilance and the risk of failure (“effort of will”). It is at issue to a greater or lesser extent whenever you have any awareness that you will face future choices like the present one. James Garson has suggested that the self-referential nature of choice makes it chaotic in the sense that the weather is, making prediction impossible in principle. However, some have objected that mere unpredictability will not produce a sense of ownership of decisions: If chaos-type data can be used to justify the existence of free will in humans, they can also be used to justify the existence of free will in chaotic pendulums, weather systems, leaf distribution, and mathematical equations (Sappington, 1990). A decision unpredictable in principle may still seem external, perhaps as Amadeus Mozart is said (probably falsely) to have experienced his musical ideas: “Whence and how do they come? I do not know and I have nothing to do with it.” Apparently, for a choice to be experienced as freely willed, a person must be aware of taking part in it and still be unsure of its outcome. This is exactly the experience that would be expected from recursive self-prediction. Intertemporal bargaining can occur rapidly. At one moment you have ample reason to abstain from indulging. Then you think of an excuse, perhaps some way of believing that you can indulge just this once. You evaluate the chances that future selves will see this as a lapse and, seeing a substantial risk of this, downwardly revise your contingent estimate of your prospect for long-term self-control, making this option less attractive. You try to think of a more acceptable indulgence to assuage your present urgency, or a better excuse for the original one. All this can happen in the space of a second or two. As Hanson points out, a similar mechanism for the experience of freedom was proposed by Tomis Kapitan (1986; Hanson’s p. 37), of whose work

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I was not aware. Kapitan makes an excellent case using only the conscious uncertainty that accompanies close deliberations. However, it might then be thought that choices about which you had already made up your mind would feel less free. Adding the constant possibility that a chance excuse will loosen an SS reward from the control of even a confident resolution, we can expect the experience of recursive self-prediction to tinge all choices with the feeling of freedom. 5. Blame Hanson says that you are blameworthy when you are tempted rather than addicted, or, if addicted, when you do not take steps that you have reason to believe will cure you of your addiction. He discerns a key dichotomy between “yielding to temptation”—“having done the wrong thing at a choice-node”— and “being addicted, which connotes much more than that” (p. 36). “Addiction appears to presuppose the notion of compulsion” (ibid.), by which he apparently means that it has crossed a line between voluntary and involuntary. I will dispute the existence of such a line presently. Here I argue that, although “addiction” means something stronger than “temptation,” no line exists between these conditions either. Authors often raise the question of whether particular bad habits (gambling, credit abuse, “compulsive” anything) are addictions, but we have no obvious test. The involvement of a substance does not determine even the common physiological accompaniments of addiction: Cocaine does not lead to physiological tolerance and withdrawal, for instance, while intense involvement in gambling does (Wray and Dickerson, 1981). Addiction does not need a physiological or visceral component. Viscerality of reward, which Hanson follows others (for example, Loewenstein, 1996) in proposing as a necessary element of addiction, refers only to a readiness to provoke emotional engagement, which a person may develop during almost any activity. Loewenstein lists curiosity as an example of viscerality (1996), and the prizes that were said to evoke viscerality in the first fMRI study of reward as a function of delay were coupons for Amazon.com (McClure, et al., 2004). Any reward that is not in a person’s long-range interest—S1’s interest—but that regularly overcomes S1’s attempts to avoid it could be called addictive, and that person could be called an addict. (The question of what to call the person who has not recognized the harmfulness of the reward—has not developed an S2—or has given up trying to avoid the reward, need not detain us here.) “Were we to hold on to the thesis that all persons are addicts, we would have to invent new sorts of addictions” (p. 37). Common experience amply confirms the religious truism that all persons are sinners in some area or another; addiction is just a matter of degree. High and low degrees are easy to name, but there is no natural line in the middle.

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Even belief itself (“the self can do something to end that poverty”; “that a particular strategy fails”; “life was unacceptably poor,” [pp. 75, 88, 90 respectively]), by which Hanson tests responsibility, is apt to function like a personal rule, reflecting the outcome of intertemporal negotiation more than simple observation. Causality that is attributed to external factors often resides in recursive self-prediction. For instance, recovering alcoholics have long believed that they have a biological susceptibility that causes a single drink to lead to irresistible craving; but it has been shown experimentally that the belief that they have had a drink of alcohol, not the alcohol itself, is followed by craving (Maisto, et. al., 1977). Furthermore, truce lines between long-term interests and temptations are often experienced as facts, the more so the more unique they are. Whether you perceive that something is clean or dirty, or is valuable, may as much depend on your rules for behaving toward it as the rules depend on your perception (see Ainslie, in press). An alcoholic’s belief in the proposition that she will become sober if and only if she accepts an arduous treatment is an interpretation of complex information, which she will inevitably steer according to current incentives, as I described above. In effect, it is a piece of internal legislation, the passage of which depends on incentives not very different from the incentives governing drinking itself. That alcoholic’s S1 might favor it if its implication for behavior were enforceable; but if rampant S2s can be expected to sabotage it, S1 might be wiser not to send its willpower forward into another defeat. S1 has an incentive not to believe the proposition, or not to believe it enough. Here, too, the question of whether the alcoholic believes p or not-p is not binary. In looking for criteria for blameworthiness, we should remember that blame can also be an entirely internal issue—self-blame. Self-blame is how you experience the cost of violating your personal rules, which is objectively a fall in your prospects for impulse control—perhaps your “self-efficacy,” as Albert Bandura (1986) called it. Although your beliefs about how current choices tie into something larger are first suggested by your parents, you inevitably test them and revise them in the laboratory of day-to-day choice making. Some people, notably those with antisocial personality disorders, have less self-blame than their culture tells them they should. Compulsive people may find themselves preoccupied with it. But in any case, self-blame is a practical tool that is learned by use. The first lesson to learn from its example is that a belief in determinism is not crucial. Determinist and libertarian alike blame themselves for violations of their personal rules. The second lesson is that our intuitions about social blame may be modeled on self-blame, instead of the other way around. We put ourselves in the other person’s shoes and ask if we could have restrained ourselves. Social blame had crude rationales until a few hundred years ago, hinging entirely on actual behavior and ignoring intention to the extent that farm animals were sometimes prosecuted as criminals and hanged (Beirne, 1994). Religious guilt was similarly literal. In the Christian Church, intent was considered in assess-

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ing sin only from late Medieval times (Colish, 1999, pp. 274–288). The rationale for social blame is still unsettled, a conflicting collection of utility and desert theories. But in practice the assignment of social blame appears to be quick and sure, a process more of “affective intuition than deliberative reasoning.” (Greene and Haidt, 2002, p. 517). Given the increasing recognition of how we put ourselves into others’ situations, the hypothesis that social blame is at least sometimes an empathic extension of the internal process of selfblame is viable—although certainly not demonstrated at this point. Adopting this hypothesis for the moment, we can examine blame as a practical process. We distinguish our own blameworthiness from regret: If we carelessly lost the winning lottery ticket the pain is self-blame, but if we chose to go to one window and the winning ticket was sold at the other the pain is just regret. If we gave in to a temptation we generally feel greater blame than if we just acted stupidly—but not if the temptation was so great that we could not imagine resisting it. If the pain was too intense to continue the treatment, if the panic at public speaking was too great to stay in the room, or even if the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity was overwhelmingly tempting, then blame might not be an issue. However, if we gave in to a regrettable urge but see how we could have resisted it, we take it as a loss in a particular mental account having to do with self-control, and experience that loss as self-blame. When the subject is someone else, the hypothesis goes, we perform this analysis vicariously. Accordingly, individuals try to exculpate themselves with others by producing evidence that the demand for self-control would have been unrealistic. The rule of thumb we most often use to evaluate this evidence is whether the behavior was caused by a factor that was not in turn responsive to the person’s choice; but such responsiveness is often ambiguous. Intertemporal bargaining theory predicts incentives for such ambiguity in individuals who control themselves with personal rules. In effect, personal rules create a principal/agent problem. A long-range interest, as principal, can be regarded as supervising successive motivational states of the person (agents) by means of personal rules. The purpose of personal rules is to organize enough incentive to keep the long-range interest continuously dominant over many successive states, that is, to prevent the emergence of S2’s. However, an individual agent (the person at a given moment) may increase its discounted expected reward by following a short-range interest to a limited extent, stopping short of violating a rule and thereby reducing the expected reward that depends on this rule. This is an intertemporal variant of the interpersonal situation where an employer (principal) tries to accomplish a task by hiring an agent who does not have as great an interest in the outcome of that task, the employer paying the agent as long as the agent follows the principal’s instructions (Ross, 1973). The agent may then maximize its personal welfare by looking busy, being passive where an instruction does not require action, focusing on the letter of the instructions

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rather than on any personal sense of what will bring results, and making its work as opaque to the supervisor as the instructions allow—the classic outcome of command economies. Such an individual could be considered blameworthy, although hard to catch. Within the person, however, being hard to catch results in unconsciousness in the psychodynamic sense and a consequent evasion of self-blame. The principal/agent relationship leads to maximization of the welfare of the current moment—not frank impulsiveness but stealthy erosion of responsibility. And to the extent that an individual applies this personal example empathically, to assess social blame, it may yield a verdict of blamelessness, even though conscious evasion would be blameworthy. Because the extent to which a person has invited the exculpatory condition is often dubious, questions of blame are often controversial. Cause by a disease has stood out as a gold-standard excuse. Research subjects who are told of hypothetical failures of self-control judge that the agents are much less culpable if they have abnormal levels of a neurotransmitter than if they had predisposing childhoods, even though the prevalence of the failures and responsiveness to deterrence is supposedly the same in the two conditions (Monterosso, et al., 2005). Subjects also feel freer to misbehave after hearing arguments for determinism (Holton, 2008; Vohs and Schooler, 2008), suggesting that determinism, poorly differentiated from fatalism, is irrationally interpreted as a kind of disease. However, as science is increasingly able to identify neural proximate causes for behaviors, such causes cease to be reliable indicators of disease. Decisions themselves can be observed in the brain by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Understanding all cannot excuse all. Irresistible impulse has been a controversial excuse in law. Apparently we have no test for when an impulse is resistible. Overcoming an addiction is a matter of arranging prospects in such a way that the addictive behavior is not frequently preferable to its alternatives. Because bundling is usually a necessary component of this project, and bundling requires not lapsing (by crossing a bright line), infrequently preferring the addictive behavior is apt to mean never preferring the addictive behavior—“one drink is too many.” Strategies for not lapsing include not getting too close to possible consumption, using the other committing tactics described above, and fostering alternative sources of reward. Since addicts have often ruined their sources of alternative reward, they may have little defense against sudden opportunities or even aroused appetites, and wind up unable to discern enough future reward to stake against impulses. Whereas an unusually great reward in a particular modality might reasonably be called a disease— an itch that demands to be scratched—scratching it remains a motivated behavior. The motivational resourcelessness of the addict’s long-range interest is better likened to a budgetary crisis. When the threat of blame has no likelihood of adding enough incentive, we might say that the addict is no longer responsible for its choices, but such an interpretation implies bankruptcy rather than sickness.

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We have no natural test for when to declare such a bankruptcy. Hanson’s proposal that addicts should be held responsible “when they fail to try appropriate methods of [recovery]” (p.93), or persist in ineffective methods is as good a rule of thumb as any, but not all addicts are resourseless—a previously abstinent addict might reasonably blame itself or be blamed for a lapse itself. Conversely, someone deep in the throes of addiction might be unable to find motivation for even the first steps of recovery. Our problem is that even though many cases demand a binary choice—send the agent to jail or not— a robust binary test for blameworthiness is a chimera. 6. Conclusions Hyperbolic discounting brings good and bad news to the debate about responsibility in addiction. The good news is that a radically reductionist mechanism becomes available for the experience of free will, and this mechanism leaves intact an agent’s responsibility for its behavior. The bad news is that no available bright line is evident between that for which the the agent should and should not be held responsible. Hanson has gone further than most commentators on picoeconomics in accepting the competition of hyperbolically motivated interests as the whole picture of psychic life. At some places, he pulls back from the brink. He wants an additional mechanism, viscerality, to turn temptation into addiction (pp. 13, 26–27); but this is from a belief that hyperbolic curves themselves cannot account for the full phenomenology of craving. He thinks that Gjelsvik’s “ego outside the marketplace” must be added to the marketplace’s invisible hand to give long-term interests their edge (p. 41); but this seems to be from a failure to recognize the temporal asymmetry that keeps “addict selves” from bundling their short-term preferences together. Most problematically, he takes advantage of this perceived need for an added ego, in the form of an undeceived S1 that knows “what it truly prefers” (p. 68), to let it transcend the realpolitik of intertemporal bargaining. Here he lets a homunculus in through the back door, unnecessarily, as I have argued. However, he has usually taken care to stay with my strictly reductionistic assumptions, has analyzed their implications in depth, and has related these implications to philosophical concepts to the greatest extent I know of. There is much of value in his method and the substance it produced that I have not addressed for lack of space. Gone is the time when psychologists were required to back their theories with controlled experiments, and philosophers were required not to do so. Authors who deal with how people make choices, the field I would call behavioral science, have begun to explore whatever approach promises to get them closer to valid answers. Their constraints no longer come from their obedience to the sporting conventions of their own games, but from their openness to criticism by any player anywhere in (on) the field. This development goes beyond the undeniably valuable borrowing of each other’s techniques

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(for example, Knobe and Nichols, 2008) to an analysis of each other’s findings. Such analysis entails not just bilateral confrontations but a melding of many schools (for example, Gintis, 2007), and the evolution of analysts who are not uniquely identified with any one of them. Hanson’s book is a significant contribution to this process. The cost of crossing disciplines is some inevitable misunderstanding, but this can be worked out with dialogue. I am grateful to Hanson for pursuing this dialogue with me.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS CRAIG HANSON is an assistant professor of Philosophy at Palm Beach Atlantic University where he holds a dual appointment in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Lloyd L. Gregory School of Pharmacy. His research interests lie in the areas of self-defeating behaviors, addictions, and compulsions. GEORGE AINSLIE is a behavioral economist who has used several methods to explore the fundamental determinants of choice. His modeling of higher mental processes from the motivated interaction of simple reward-seeking interests has been published in journals of psychology, philosophy, economics, and law, in many book chapters, and in two books: Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States (Cambridge, 1992) and Breakdown of Will (Cambridge, 2001). Ainslie is a research psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Coatesville. Pennsylvania.

INDEX abstinent agents, 11 abusive relationship, 65 act(ion) (motivated) adaptation, 13, 29, 37, 96 neurobiological a., 3, 29, 66 addicts(ions)(s) passim Frankfurtian a., 81, 86 Ainslie, George, 1, 2, 9–11, 13, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 29, 31–45, 51, 54, 59–61, 63, 66–70, 75, 77, 95 A. agents, 2, 13, 23, 31, 75, 77, 91 Breakdown of Will, 41, 59 akrasia (akratic), 4–10, 13, 17, 24, 27, 96, 105 akratic action/agents, 5–8, 11, 66 alcoholics, 16, 26, 46, 56, 70, 81–83, 85, 87, 109 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), 81, 104 “On the Alleged Right to Lie from Philanthropic Concerns” (Kant), 46 Antabuse (disulfiram), 25 appetites, 5, 43, 77, 82, 111 a. portion of soul, 5 argumentative strategy, 31 Aristotle, 5–7, 11 Nicomachean Ethics, 7 attention (attention control), 10, 76, 98, 101. See also control a. control., 99, 100 deflection of a., 100 attitudes, 5, 76, 91 Augustine of Hippo, 43 Bacon, Francis, 106 Bandura, Albert, 109 bankruptcy, 11, 112 bargaining inter/intratemporal b., 34, 37, 42, 57, 96, 103–105, 107, 110, 112 power b., 34 Becker, Gary, 7, 8, 15–19, 21 Becker-Murphy Rational Choice theory of addiction, 7, 8, 15–19, 21

behavior(s), 34, 57, 84, 95, 104, 105 addictive b., 1–4, 7, 8, 9, 16–19, 28, 67, 84, 91, 109–112 akratic b., 5, 9 bundling b., 2, 10, 12, 59, 60–62, 66, 67, 102 b. inconsistent with bundling rule, 59 b. change based on evidence, 55 control of b., 34, 105 deceptive b., 65 explanations of b., 52, 58 exponential b., 59, 70 habituation-b. relationship, 28 hyperbolic b., 27, 60 inductively forecasting b., 56 intentional b., 8 justification of b., 52, 53 non-substance abuse b., 3 past b., 36, 53, 56 rational b., 11 rational choice theories of b., 7, 8, 12, 16–19, 24, 26, 53, 95, 96, 104 rationalizing b., 55, 56, 64 reinforcement-b. relationship, 21, 22 self-defeating b., 19 unacceptable/undesireable b., 12, 36 behavioral economic model(s), 1, 13 belief(s), 50, 64, 65, 68, 83, 88, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 99, 100, 105, 109, 112 collective b., 93 contradictory b., 78, 80, 81, 86 deceptive b., 80 dispositional b., 78 dual b., 80 false b., 54, 63, 82, 85, 90 folk b., 64 intentional b. motivated, biased b., 55, 80, 84, 86 occurent or dispositional b. b. rationally incompatible with selfdeception, 59

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belief(s), con’t. Pascalian b.-acquisition process, 57 practices, b.-forming, 56, 90 unconscious b., 78, 79 biological phenomenon, 66 blame, 2, 8, 53, 75–81, 84–89, 91, 93, 96, 103, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111 self-b., 89, 109–112 social b., 109–111 blameworthiness, 2, 77–80, 83, 87, 96, 108–112 Bratman, Michael, 60, 100, 105 Breakdown of Will (Ainslie), 41, 59 Buddhist view, 44 budgetary crisis, 111 bundling, 1, 2, 10–12, 24, 25, 29, 31, 42, 45, 51, 58–73, 99–105, 111, 112 Calvin, John, 104 Cartesian substance, 38. See also substance(s) Catania, A. Charles, 21, 22 causality, 106, 109 change, 5, 12, 17, 37, 55, 57, 62, 67, 68, 73, 87, 90, 98, 99, 103, 104 c. the utility function, 68, 107 character, 84, 97 c. connections, 40 cho(ice)(osing), 3–5, 9, 13, 23, 25, 27, 29, 63, 70, 87, 101, 105–107, 109, 110 binary c., 112 change of c., 99 constraining c., 29 consumptive c., 20 c. disposition, 20 exponential c., 69 hyperbolic c., 24, 61, 68 judicious c., 21 c.-moment, 38 c.-node, 13, 18, 24, 36, 108 c. points, 100, 101, 104 rational c., 7, 12, 15–19, 24, 26, 53, 62, 95, 96, 104 resolute c., McClennen’s, 62 sophisticated c., 4, 66, 104

Christian Church, 109 C. sentiments, 43 C. teachings, 55 Chung, Shin-Ho, 22 city, 43 cocaine, 27, 36, 38, 91, 108 coercion, 1, 91 command economies, 111 compatibilism, 37, 105, 106 compulsions, 4, 6, 10, 27, 28, 38, 61, 67, 69, 104, 105, 108, 109 consciousness, 66 Christian c., 43 unc., 111 consum(er)(ption ), 15, 18, 26, 38, 92 addictive c., 11, 15–18 caffeine c., 55 c. capital, 18, 19 excessive c., 83 uncontrolled c., 102 contradiction, 7, 8, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 57, 77–80, 85, 86 In Contradiction (Priest), 46 control, 3, 4, 26, 27, 33–38, 40, 41, 43, 52–54, 56, 58, 66, 84, 91, 92, 105, 108 attention c., 99, 100 impulse c., 94, 103, 104, 109 self-c., 102–104, 110, 111 voluntary c., 1 cooperation, 25, 107 craving, 37, 38, 86, 109, 112 criminogenetic social circumstances, 64 data, 49, 55, 93, 95, 107 Davidson, Donald, 6, 7, 45, 47–51, 57, 64, 86, 100 decision(s), 4, 9, 13, 14, 17, 18, 21, 24, 56, 57, 60, 61, 68, 71–73, 111 addiction, d. component of, 28, 29 inconsistent d., 53 d.-making processes, 27, 28, 107 past d., 37 d. theorist, 32 d. theorist’s puzzle, 65 twentieth-century d. theory, 20

Index deduction, 95 deontology, passionless, 25, 105 Kantian d., 10 desire(s), 3, 6, 8, 11, 14–16, 24–26, 28, 40, 48, 52, 53, 55–57, 63, 65– 67–69, 79, 81, 82, 87, 90, 91, 92, 97, 101, 103, 104 unconscious d., 69, 78 determinism (determinist), 105–107, 109, 111 dialethism (two truths), 46. See also truth(s) disapproval, 17, 90 disassociation, 69 disposition(s) d. belief, 78 fundamental choice d., 20 successive d. to choose, 34, 39 divorce, 54, 65, 69, 102–104 doubt condition, 80 drinking, 16, 25, 35, 36, 47, 48, 70, 83, 86, 87, 90, 97–99, 101, 102, 109 ego, 31, 43, 97, 106, 112 global e., 45 split e., 34 Elster, Jon, 3, 26, 27, 60 Strong Feelings, 60 emotion(s), 26, 39, 65, 99, 108 epistemology of the self, 33, 39. See also sel(f)(ves) essentialism, 35 evidence that influences behavior or belief, 8, 11, 18, 50, 55, 64, 69, 71, 75, 85, 86, 91, 93, 110 e.-gathering of addicts, 8 , 88 rationalizing away e., 81 evil, 43 e. deed, 80 e. nature, 44 evolution, 95, 113 exculpatory condition, 111 Expectancy Theory, 56 experience(s), 18, 19, 35, 36, 40, 41, 52, 59, 63, 92, 95, 103, 106–110 aversive e., 98

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exponential discounting function, 19 exponential valuation function(s), 21 fals(ehood)(ity), 8, 11, 19, 26, 36, 48, 49, 51, 52–54, 64, 68, 82, 84, 85, 107 f. beliefs, 63, 82 f. positive, 90 forensic psychiatrists, 89 Frankfurtian addict, 81, 86 free will, 105–107, 112 freedom, 3, 4, 6, 7, 26, 37, 59, 77, 95, 101, 105–108, 111 addicted are unfree, 96 Galen of Pergamon, 106 Garson, James, 107 giving in, 6, 9, 40, 66 Gjelsvik, Olav, 41, 42, 112 goals, 40, 97 God, existence of, 57 Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting (Laibson), 26 good(s), 7–10, 16, 18, 21, 27, 28, 37, 38, 43, 48, 52, 60, 61, 63, 67, 79, 80 addictive g., 11, 24, 31 bundled g., 68, 69 hypothetical g., 20, 23 Gur, Ruben, 78 habituation, 28 Haji, Ishtiyaque, 77–81, 85, 86, 88, 91 Hanson, Craig, 95–105, 107–109, 112 Hare, Richard Mervyn, 6, 25 Heath, Joseph, 20 Heather, Nick, 21 heroin, 27, 36, 37, 51, 53, 54, 56, 65 Herrnstein, Richard, 21, 22 Hobbes, Thomas, 96 Holton, Richard, 99, 100, 106 homunculus, 1036, 112 human condition, 9, 45 hyperbolic discounting, 1, 9, 10, 11, 19, 22, 23, 25–28, 32, 36, 37, 39, 40, 54, 58–60, 66, 67, 72, 75, 96, 99, 102, 103, 105, 107, 112 hypnotizability, 100

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identity, 31, 35, 36, 37, 43, 44, 64, 80 ignorance, 72, 78, 79 impetuosity, 5, 11 importance condition, 80 impulse(s), 100, 105 i. control, 99, 103, 104, 109 irresistible i., 111 incentive(s), 97, 100, 104–106, 109–111 discounted i., 96 indeterminacy, 106, 107 insurance adjusters, 26 intention(s), 51, 78, 84, 100, 109 rational i., 101 interest(s), 31, 40, 44, 60, 61, 76, 97, 100, 103, 105 competing i., 98 drinking vs. sobriety i., 99 long-/short-range i., 108, 110, 111 opposing i., 102 introspective opacity, 107 intuition, 35, 55, 56, 91, 109, 110 counter i., 34 philosophical i., 7 Rawlsean i., 71 irrationality, 1, 7, 9–11, 13–15, 17, 24, 26, 27, 31, 40, 46, 48, 58–60, 63, 84, 95, 111. See also rationality jail, 86, 88, 112 James, William, 100–102, 104 judg(e)(ment), 4–6, 8, 17, 42, 52, 56, 70, 79, 80, 91, 95, 101, 111 “Just say ‘No,’” 84 Kant, Immanuel, 46 “On the Alleged Right to Lie from Philanthropic Concerns,” 46 K. deontology, 10, 61, 105 lying, K. principle about, 46 K. scholars, 25 Kapitan, Thomas, 37, 107, 108 Kolm, Serge-Christopher, 44 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 96 Man a Machine, 96

Laibson, David, 25, 26 Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting, 26 lapse(s) (lapsing) Levy, Neil, 77, 80–89, 103 liber(ation)(y), 3, 57, 59, 63, 67, 71, 108 liberatarian, 109 linguistic reality/invention, 31, 40, 44, 54 Lowenstein, George, 3, 26 luck, 40, 54, 75 MacLean, Paul, 106 magical thinking, 60, 65, 105 Man a Machine (La Mettrie), 96 matching law, 21, 27 Mazur, James E., 22 McClennen, Edward, 62, 100 Pragmatic Rationality and Rules (62) M.’s resolute choosing, 62 Medieval times, 110 Mele, Alfred R., 48–50, 54, 55, 57, 64, 77, 81, 88, 100 biased/motivated belief, M.’s notion of, 80 self-deception, M.’s version of, 79, 80, 85 memory, 33, 39–42, 51, 57, 70, 71 mental exotica, 48 mental processes, 95 mind, 31, 43, 100 body-m. separation, 67 philosophy of m., 35, 96, 101 theories of m., 107 Mintoff, Joe, 101 misbehavior, 111 moderation, 71, 87, 88, 91 money pump scenario, 13–15 Monterosso, John, 60 motivational science, 95 motivational states, successive 31, 34, 39, 103, 107, 110 Mozart, Amadeus, 107 Murphy, Kevin, 7. See also BeckerMurphy Rational Choice theory of addiction

Index Necrotica, 37, 38 negotiation, 104 intertemporal n., 109 Jesuitical n., 102 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 7 obstacles, 4, 83 ontological box, person is an, 32 ontology of the self, 33, 37–39 See also sel(f)(ves) Ainslie’s o. of s., 42 opportunit(ies)(y), 10, 18, 92, 98, 110, 111 Orphanides, Athanasios, 17, 18 ought implies can, 27 panic, 98, 110 Parfit, Derek, 40, 95, 97, 98 partitioning, 7, 48, 50, 57, 78, 79 Davidsonian p., 100 passions, 5, 41, 61, 106 p.less deontology, 25, 105 Paul the Apostle, 43, 44 personality, 34, 35, 37, 97, 103 antisocial p. disorders, 109 picoeconomics, 96, 112 pity, 90 Plato, 5, 6, 43 Protagoras, 5 Republic, 5, 43 P. skepticism, 6 pleasure, 15, 25, 28, 71 plurality of entities, 32 Pragmatic Rationality (McClennen), 62 precommit(ment )(ters), 4, 34, 35, 56, 88, 99,110 prediction, 25, 71, 96, 99 deterministic model of p., 107 self-p., 101, 105–109 preference(s), 22, 23, 25, 37, 42, 47, 54, 56–58, 66–70, 76, 97, 98, 100– 104, 111, 112 former/past p., 11, 12, 21, 55 inconsistent p., 13–15, 31 irrational p., 26 p. reversals, 9, 10, 15, 24, 36, 37, 58, 60, 61, 63

127

satisfied p., 16, 17 p.-sets, 18, 32, 35 p. shifts, 62 stable p., 19, 21 temporary p., 9, 27, 34 p. utilitarianism, 76 utility function, p. with, 38 price elasticity, 16 Priest, Graham, 46 In Contradiction, 46 principal/agent problem, 110 prisoner’s dilemma, 25, 31, 39, 102 Protagoras (Plato), 5 psychological connections, 40 Quattrone, George, 78 Rachlin, Howard, 104 Rational Choice Addiction, 15, 17, 19 Rational Choice Theor(ists)(y), 7, 8, 12, 16–19, 24, 26, 53, 95, 96, 104 Becker and Murphy on RCT, 15 rationality, 5, 9, 11, 12, 16–19, 24, 25, 31, 38, 42, 45, 46, 52, 53, 55, 58–62, 65, 72, 84, 95, 96, 101, 102, 104, 105 See also irrationality bundling, r. of, 59–73 r. choice, 18, 26, 95, 96 Marketplace r., 41 Rawls, John, 7 R. intuitions, 71 R. just saving principle, 72 A Theory of Justice, 7, 71 reason(ing), 5, 6, 41, 43, 71, 84, 106, 110 redefinist fallacy, 27, 61 reductionism, 34, 106 reductionistic theories, 95, 105, 112 rehabilitation facility, 56, 88 reinforce(ment)(rs), 15–17, 21–23, 92 relapse, 19, 34, 83 repression, Freudian, 100, 102 Republic (Plato), 5, 43 resignation, 102 responsibility, moral, 1, 2, 11, 26, 64, 75–77, 80, 81, 85, 87, 89, 91, 92, 96, 105

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retirement investment, 26 revelation, 65 reward, 9, 22–25, 28, 102–105, 107, 108 alternative r., 111 delayed r., 101 expected r., 96, 103, 110 long-/short-term r., 36, 67, 95–99 r.-maximizing, 101 prospective r., 98, 104, 105 r. seeking, 34 rule(s), 10, 29, 51, 65, 66, 102, 104 bundling r., 59, 61, 67–69 compulsion, r. as, 69 r. followers, 67–69 grouping r., 24 moral r., 52 personal r., 103, 109, 110 willing r. causes disociation, 67, 69 Rumgay, Judith, 56 Sackheim, Harold, 78 Samuelson, Paul, 19 sel(f)(ves) Cartesian enduring ego notion of, 31 intentionalist/contradictory approach to s., 45 multiple s., 25, 31, 32, 38, 43, 45, 51, 55, 71, 80, 92 reductionistic s., 34 fictitious s., 34 non-unitary view of s., 32, 42 successive s., 25, 32, 34, 39, 55, 58, 70, 76, 96 selection(ist), 95 self-awareness, 67, 105 self-blame, 89, 109–111 self-control, 102–104, 110, 111. See also control self deception (dehyphenated), 54–59, 61–67, 69, 73, 76, 85, 89, 90, 92, 101, 102, 105 reverse s. d., 56 self-deception (hyphenated), 1, 2, 6, 8, 10–12, 31, 33, 39–42, 45–57, 62, 64, 77–86, 95, 96, 99, 102, 105 Ainsliean s.-d., 51

self-governance, 33, 41–43, 70 self-prediction, recursive, 101, 105, 107– 109. See also prediction sex,, 27 sickness, 111 sin, 43, 101, 104, 110 skepticism, Platonic, 6 Skog, Ole-Jørgen, 15–18 sobriety, 67, 83, 97, 99, 104, 105, 109 Srtong Feelings (Elster), 60 Strawson, Peter, 76 Suarez, Antoine, 106 substance, addictive, 10, 11, 14–16, 18– 20, 23, 26–28, 52, 89, 92 s. abuse, 3, 47, 56, 87, 88, 108 s. dependence, 3, 101 temptation, 1, 2, 6, 10, 11, 13, 23, 27, 28, 38, 40, 66, 84, 96, 99, 100, 102, 104, 108–110, 112 theologians, 44, 104 A Theory of Justice (Rawls), 7, 71 t'Hooft, Gerard, 106 thoughts, 52, 108 negative t., 51 time-slices, 32, 35 diachronic t.-s., 31, 44 tolerance, 15, 16, 18, 108 transitivity (transparency), 36, 100 transparency. See transitivity truth(s), 26, 46, 48, 55, 61, 80, 82, 83, 85, 90, 96. See also falsity t.-value, 49 Tversky, Amos, 78 Ulysses, 4, 62, 88 urges, 3, 4, 9, 24, 83, 100, 104, 107, 110 utility, 10, 14–21, 25, 38, 59, 60, 110 disu., 10, 69 u. function, 22, 32, 38, 68, 104 maximization of u., 14, 15, 17, 70, 71 valuation, 7, 9, 10, 20, 24, 27, 29, 40, 66, 84 exponential v., 21 hyperbolic v., 23

Index value(s), 5–8, 11, 14, 15, 17, 20, 21–25, 27, 36, 53–55, 66, 69, 71, 92, 97, 98, 102, 104, 112 declining v. curve, 101 facts. v.-based, 41 truth-v., 49 victims, 3, 14, 15, 24, 26, 57, 76, 79, 86, 88, 91 blameworthy v., 83 vigilance, 107 viscerality, 108, 112 addiction, v. accout of, 3–5, 7, 8, 11– 13, 26, 28, 29, 37, 66 v. craving, 38 v. factors/influences, 3, 4, 28, 36, 37

129

v. forces, 3, 8, 26, 37 v. susceptibility, 66 v. taste, 28, 37 volition, 95, 96 Vuchinich, Rudy, 21, 22 Watson, Gary, 6, 77, 82 will(power), 3, 4, 34, 39, 42, 61, 68, 88, 103–105. 109 bundling hypothesis of w., 101 free w., 105–107, 112 ill w., 89 weakness of w., 62, 68 Zervos, David, 17, 18

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