Evidence is good - I am not exceptionally brilliant but I get that. There are other considerations, still, and some of the obove posters make very good points.
If you apply the disease/ medical model to a behavior, what are the implications for free will philosophically? What are the implications for psychotherapy?
I think the above posters answer the question well. Responsibility and only passing consideration for blame.
This discussion about blame/choice is analogous to the discussion about whether free will exists, which has existed for time immemorial.
“Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.
The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. But it left some room, at least in the popular imagination, for the possibility that we could overcome our circumstances or our genes to become the author of our own destiny. The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.
It seems that when people stop believing they are free agents, they stop seeing themselves as blameworthy for their actions. Consequently, they act less responsibly and give in to their baser instincts. Vohs emphasized that this result is not limited to the contrived conditions of a lab experiment. “You see the same effects with people who naturally believe more or less in free will,” she said.
Smilansky is convinced that free will does not exist in the traditional sense—and that it would be very bad if most people realized this.
Smilansky’s arguments may sound odd at first, given his contention that the world is devoid of free will: If we are not really deciding anything, who cares what information is let loose? But new information, of course, is a sensory input like any other; it can change our behavior, even if we are not the conscious agents of that change. In the language of cause and effect, a belief in free will may not inspire us to make the best of ourselves, but it does stimulate us to do so.”
But we all may be better off believing in it anyway.
www.theatlantic.com
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I seriously cannot abide by the notion that someone is completely powerless in the face of addiction, like okay so then what if you at least started working on taking some of the addiction's power back for yourself? Do you think you'll suddenly be attacked by a bunch of flying needles? Is your drug of addiction suddenly going to turn into Godzilla and start terrorising the city? Of course not, so yeah you're not completely powerless in the face of addiction. Even if it feels like you have no power or control over an addiction, how is it anyway helpful to then go ahead and basically hand all your power over to you substance of choice? "Dear heroin, I feel like I have no power or control over you, so clearly the best course of action for me is to convince myself I am utterly powerless, hand all my power over to you, and proceed to just flop about helplessly at your feet" Yeah, no.
