Addiction, Choice and Responsible Agency

At the centre of our approach to addiction is a set of conceptual and theoretical issues that lies at the intersection between economics, philosophy and psychology. A unifying research theme concerns what it is about addiction, if anything, that produces impaired autonomy and diminished responsibility. Our approach is based on an interdisciplinary investigation into how the motivational structure faced by addicts differs from that of the non-addicted, and what difference this makes to responsibility for b ehaviour stemming from addiction. In the first part of the project we aim to provide conceptual clarification of various key notions, such as the notions of 'personal autonomy', 'preference' and 'self-control', and how they relate to normativity and time. We also want to identify some actual causal beliefs held by people concerning how addictive goods work, and suggest how they can be represented in a choice model. The objective at this stage will be to develop a conceptual framework for understanding the kind(s) of failures produced by addiction, and how they might affect addicts' autonomy. Our general methodological approach will be theoretical and conceptual analysis, but we also want to employ quantitative surveys, interviews and experimental testing to obtain empirical information when this is required (e.g., we aim to develop an interview guide and use this to elicit causal beliefs from a set of people with varying experience with addictive goods). In the second part of the project we want to addres s the implications of this conceptual framework for various practical issues. These are related to the capability of addicts to give informed consent, to belief-formation and information campaigns (e.g., how does the quality of people's causal beliefs and risk estimates influence the type of public policies we should enact towards them?) and finally, to social intervention policies (soft vs. hard paternalism).