If You Don't Like this Post, Maybe I was Drunk When I Wrote It

Jacob Sullum at Reason takes on the use of alcoholism as an all purpose excuse: http://www.reason.com/sullum/101106.shtml. It seems that “the alcohol made me do it” is the new “the devil made me do it”. You can be forgiven any rash statement if you admit that “it was the whiskey talking”.

I don’t know if it is still the case, but when I worked at the VA, alcoholism was considered personal misconduct, and disease or injury attributable to alcohol abuse might not qualify you for benefits. At the same time, the consensus in the mental health community was that alcoholism was a “disease”. How comforting for the booze hound to know that he is in the grips of a disease and is not responsible for the consequences of his drunkenness.

I am an agnostic as to the reality of free will, and I concede that every human action and decision may be ultimately determined by external factors and forces. We aren’t capable of identifying all these determinants, and we tend to attribute to actors some responsibility for their decisions and actions as if they had some control of them. Of course, we tend to attribute our own actions to our circumstances while at the same time attributing the actions of others to their character. Ultimately, both our circumstances and character may be attributed to a series of determinants over which we had no control. If I am a man of weak and base character, the course of my life has made me such, and I am destined to act in accordance with the character with which I have been endowed.

I think I understand the severe alcoholic. God knows that I have self medicated with alcohol from time to time. Once you really start hitting the sauce, your life begins to fall apart. You screw up your career, your family, your health. Then you need the sweet oblivion of a good drunken bender more than ever. You get to the point where sobering up is a scary proposition because then you have to face the fact that you are a week away from living under an overpass and eating out of a dumpster (unless you hook up with some enablers). You decide to quit drinking tomorrow. You decide this every day for months until you finally drink yourself to death. It wasn’t your fault. You were weak and fell into the black hole of self destruction.

On the other hand, the way society treats alcoholism might very well be one of those determinants that influences whether a particular individual will become a total booze hound. If society disapproves of irresponsible boozing and holds folks accountable for the consequences of drunkenness, some would be drunks are bound to be deterred by this and others are more likely to intervene. The attribution of responsibility to the drunk does not imply that alcoholism should not be treated medically or psychologically much as a disease might be treated, and it does not follow that the consequences of drunkenness should not be mitigated. Rather, the personal responsibility meme functions primarily as a deterrent in this case and an impetus to rehabilitation.

The free will meme itself functions to structure social interaction in a way that rewards certain actions and outcomes and penalizes others. This meme, together with the concepts of internal locus of control and personal responsibility, may be among the most influential determinants of character and decision-making. A weakening of this meme complex would have far reaching effects, most of them undesirable as far as I am concerned. In addition to surrendering to alcohol, a person having no sense of responsibility would be more likely to surrender himself to the collective.

Have I weakened the meme complex by failing to affirm the reality of free will? I think not. My argument is that the free will meme is valuable and useful whether it is “true” or not. It may not be possible to determine whether it is “true” since it seems to me to be something of a normative proposition rather than a description of reality, but for most people to act “as if” it were true yields outcomes that I regard as more desirable than those which might arise if we acted as if it were not true.

Using alcoholism as an excuse is an attempt to escape responsibility, not just for the abuse of the alcohol, but for anything we do while we are inebriated. Alcohol, in this line of reasoning, robs us of our free will. And since we couldn’t help drinking, since it is a disease and all, we aren’t responsible for surrendering our free will. Let’s hope that this doesn’t get much traction. Otherwise, someday nobody will ever be held responsible for anything they did while they were drunk.

I don’t dismiss the idea altogether. There are some things that we might readily excuse a drunk, such as stupid utterances or drunken rants or passes at other people’s spouses. Many of us harbor toxic ideas that we work hard to overcome but which were planted in us in our upbringing. When we get drunk, we may come off much more bigoted, sexist or misanthropic than we strive to be when we have more control of our faculties. It really is the “whiskey talking”. Of course, we are free to discriminate against folks on the basis of what is ordinarily concealed in their brains, and we can thank alcohol for outing such folks.