Addiction, free will and wanting not to want something?

In a paper on addiction and freedom of the will, Olav Gjelsvik makes some useful distinctions and clarifications. The basic question is whether addictive behaviour should be viewed as the outcome of a free choice. Olav first distinguishes between freedom of action and freedom of the will and argues the addicts act intentionally and have freedom of action, but that they typically lack freedom of the will because they do not want to have the desire to take drugs.

After reading the paper, I have two comments. First, Jon Elster has argued that the very notion of "wanting not to want x" is incoherent. If this is true, Olav's argument breaks down. However, I am not sure that Elser is correct. It seems common at least to experience feelings like "I wish I did not have such a strong desire to do x." Now, it may be conceptually incoherent to think this and still do x at the same point in time, but across time it may be more coherent.

Second, when defining free will we need a criterion for what a good definition is. The criterion, in turn, depends on the purpose of the term. What is the purpose of putting the label "freely willed and chosen" on some actions (or patterns of action) and not on others? I think there are at lest two major reasons. First, when we use the label we also imply that the agent is responsible and that the action has welfare-relevant information. The purpose of the term cannot be divorced from the intuition behind these concepts. The criterion for whether the definition is good, is whether it puts actions into categories which conforms to our reflective intuitions about whether the person should be held responsible.