Responsibility to Recover: Addiction and Self-Care

Abstract

Addicts, an already vulnerable population, can be made worse off by certain kinds of popular and well-intentioned research programs and beliefs about addiction, agency, and responsibility. Perspectives of backwards-facing responsibility that focus on blameworthiness and liability highlight the injustices that addicts have faced. Likewise, the disease model of addiction, pursued as an alternative to the stigmatization and moralization of the choice model, takes responsibility away from the addict. However, each of these fails to help the addict to recover or to care for herself. If anything, embracing these perspectives and models can rob addicts of agency and lead them to further suffering. Drawing on feminist philosophy, this paper shows there is good evidence for us to reconsider those models and perspectives, and instead ask what kind of understandings about addiction aid in fostering agency and recovery.