Excusing addiction

16/01/2026

Many people are sympathetic to the idea that being an addict can be relevant to how much blame someone deserves when they do something wrong. What options are there for explaining why this is true? Will any of them make a difference to persuading people who doubt that is true?

Two people steal. One does so because they are going out, they can only afford fare for the bus, and they’d much rather travel in style, by taking a taxi. The other steals because they’re an addict, and they have no way of scoring, of getting some of whatever it is they’re addicted to, without stealing. I, and many people, have the feeling that one of these thefts, the one that involves addiction, is excused, in roughly the sense that it merits less blame that a typical theft would. The first theft seems like a paradigm case of uncomplicatedly blameworthy behaviour. The second, because of the role addiction is playing, does not. Why not? 

An interesting feature of the debate about this is the sheer variety of directions in which people have looked for an answer. Hannah Pickard suggests that the solution is to adopt her ‘responsibility without blame’ framework, which involves radically thinking how quite general notions like responsibility, blame and agency fit together. Others think that that the key thing is to note that addicts are unable to refrain from trying to score (despite the fact that, when they try to score, they do act intentionally). Others think that the key thing is to understand the distinctive neurophysiology of paradigm objects of addiction – e.g. perhaps the key thing to know is that a substance like cocaine can cause dopamine spikes which constitute very strong desires for cocaine, but do not constitute states of liking cocaine very much.

My own view is, in a way, much simpler than any of these. I think addiction can excuse because addictive desires are immensely strong (i.e. immensely motivating). The addict’s desire to use is plausibly far stronger than the non-addict’s desire to take a take a taxi. As a result, although the non-addict’s action seems very uncaring, the addict’s action does not – it is credible that they cared a good deal about their parents, but that this care didn’t get a grip on their action because it was present but outweighed by an immensely strong desire to use. A nice thing about this story is that, setting addiction aside, a difference in how uncaring two actions are does sound like the kind of thing that would make a difference to how appropriate it is to respond to each of them with blame.

However, in my experience, this story is apt to strike many people as pretty thin gruel. It can seem somehow dismissive of addiction, perhaps even unsympathetic to addicts. It sounds like the kind of thing that someone who doesn’t really think addiction can excuse might say.

I think that the story’s weakness is primarily a rhetorical, not an explanatory, one. The story makes salient that there is a continuity between the person who wants to take a taxi and the addict who want to score – each does something wrong because doing the right thing isn’t as motivating to them as something else is, and there is a difference in how motivating the something else is, a difference in degree. By contrast, the story that says that the key thing for mitigation is that the person who wants to take a taxi is perfectly able to refrain from taking a taxi, whereas the addict who wants to score is not able to refrain from trying to score, points immediately to a difference in kind. So too, in a different way, does the story that says the key thing is that the non-addict’s desire to take a taxi is tethered to how much they like taking taxis, whereas the addict’s desire to score floats free of liking. But, and here is the critical point:  differences in degree can yield differences in kind. As Stalin and Napoleon are both supposed to have said: ‘quantity has a quality all of its own’. The remark sounds, and is, insightful because a variety of human cognitive biases combine to make it hard to assimilate the idea that differences in degree can yield differences in kind. Being reminded that they can can help in military matters, and in moral psychology.

Daniel Morgan is a lecturer at the University of York. His PhD, from the University of Oxford, was on de se thought. Much of his current research looks at issues in moral psychology, especially addiction. He has recently published papers on the nature of excuses, and on the feeling on freedom.