I.i. Addiction: what it is, what it might be

The first thing to note in attempting to pin down the problem is that addiction is a relational notion, it describes a relation of someone to something. In the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—both IV (1994) and 5 (2013)—the thing in question is some substance, such as drugs or alcohol. DSM IV defines addiction as substance dependence, which is in turn defined as maladaptive substance use leading to significant clinical impairment. The more recent edition, DSM 5, describes addiction more neutrally as a substance use disorder. ‘Disorder’ is an umbrella term that covers all sorts of impairments, from health problems, to failure to meet major responsibilities at work, school or home. These impairments, in turn, come in degrees, from mild to severe. So for example an addict can suffer only mild impairment to her health and social life, and therefore function on a daily basis pretty much like a non-addict. Recognition of this possibility makes the phenomenon of addiction rather tricky to capture, since the boundary between functioning addict and non-addicted substance user is vague.Footnote ⁴ It is also worth noting that the relation of the agent to something need not be a relation to some substance; it can be a relation to some activity, such as gambling for example, which can also produce impairments of the sort mentioned in the DSM. One positive upshot of this inconclusive diagnostic discussion is that addiction is a relational concept, it is about some agent's relation to things or activities.Footnote ⁵

Characteristic of the disorderly relation of the agent to the substance or activity to which she is addicted is its chronic nature. In medical diagnostic terminology, the contrast is with acute conditions, which have sudden onset and usually limited duration. Addiction describes something that endures and perhaps even develops over time, hence the notion of relapse is applicable here, which is when the addict falls back into the pattern of addictive behaviour after having stopped for a period. The temporal aspect of the phenomenon further complicates the task of setting clear definitional boundaries between addict and non-addict.Footnote ⁶

Studies in the neurobiology of addiction promise to help pinpoint the mechanism of addiction and so explain how some relation to a substance or activity can be out of the ordinary and therefore count as a disorder. The basic explanatory hypothesis, put forward in the early twentieth century and still largely accepted, though not undisputed, is that rewarding systems in the human organism are being usurped by various substances or activities.Footnote ⁷ Subsequent research has focused on identifying these systems both at the neurobiological level and behaviourally, with a view to explaining not just how this usurpation happens and so what can be done about it at the chemical level, but also why it happens, what moves people to do things that allow their rewarding systems to be hijacked in this way. A 2013 survey of this material in Current Opinion in Neurobiology, however, shows that a unified picture of addiction, let alone the identification of its causal mechanism, is not within reach and may no longer even be a guiding goal for research.

As it turns out then, the definition given in the DSM 5 is really a wrapper for a varied phenomenon.Footnote ⁸ Still, both in everyday and medical contexts, we do mean something when we use the term ‘addiction’. The term that seems best to capture what we mean is ‘compulsion’. Although talk of ‘craving’ has fallen out of fashion in the medical and psychological literature, compulsion is routinely used to characterize the relation of the addict to the thing to which she is addicted. Here are some examples of definitions, which cover an almost fifty-year span of literature on addiction:

The resilience of the concept of compulsion is noteworthy given the transformation of the discussion about addiction shown for example in the differences between DSM IV and DSM 5. Abstracting from the immediate context of how compulsion is used in the examples given above, that is, to describe addictive behaviour in general, specific addictions, or stages of addiction, it is easy to see why compulsion remains a useful notion: whatever else needs saying when talking about addiction, it seems to matter to make space for the thought that the addict has an urge to do something that overrides her other wants and can be said to be somehow forced to do whatever it is she does.

I.ii. Compulsion: what it means

Although it may be useful to use compulsion to describe an aspect of addiction that most find problematic, it is still not clear what ‘compulsion’ means in this context. The simplest and strongest sense that can be given to compulsion is that there is nothing a compelled person can do to stop or alter their behaviour. I think that this cannot be what some of the people cited above mean by compulsion, not least because their diagnostic effort is part of a broader aim, which is precisely to do something about the condition they seek to describe. More generally, the existence of programs of rehabilitation and treatment, and of recovering and recovered addicts, suggests strongly that the behaviour is alterable. In addition, of course, many jurisdictions treat addicts as culpable rather than as unfortunate victims of forces beyond their control.Footnote ⁹ Obviously, one may want to take a radically revisionist line that both treatment and punishment are misguided. The conceptual underpinning for such a move would be that it is simply contradictory to think of a type of behaviour that both cannot be helped and is subject to someone's will (see Corrado Reference Corrado1999: 581). I shall return to the issue of willing shortly; for the moment, I shall examine what sense can be given to ‘there is nothing one can do about it’.

Consider the following two examples of things that happen to an agent, which they cannot help:

These examples are of forces that pull and push the agent in ways she cannot help, in the sense that she cannot resist them. But these forces can be acted upon, and counteracted, by other forces; for instance, given a gadget with sufficient lift force, Jan can be propelled upwards. Once the mechanics of the relevant forces are known, they can be exploited to some end. In both cases, of course, circumstances can be such that there is nothing anyone can do about it, but this is not an intrinsic feature of the situation. It seems to me that compulsion in the case of addiction may be more fruitfully treated as a force such as gravity in the pull and push examples. It may then be approached as a technical problem, as a disorder of forces, in which one or more forces are active on the agent and which can be counteracted, given sufficient understanding of how these forces work. The gain is a conceptual shift from a phenomenon that by definition nothing can alter to one that is alterable. In practice, addiction, just like other technical problems, might not currently be soluble or not soluble for every case, but this is an empirical fact.

One difficulty with this interpretation of compulsion is that it seems unlikely that a suitably reductive model of the phenomenon of addiction can be identified given the number of fields—and hence of candidate forces and counterforces—that are relevant to the study of addiction and which range from social and environmental to neurobiological.Footnote ¹⁰ Now, it may appear that this is an unfair criticism, since the overview of what we might be talking about when we talk about addiction shows this to be a possibly irreducible phenomenon. Certainly the meaning of ‘addiction’ is of a complex relational phenomenon, which as such resists a simple definition. The reason for this is that we can point to a number of things in the world that play a role in the phenomenon and that reduction, in the sense of identifying a single cause, is possibly a misplaced ambition in this context. However, reduction can remain a useful explanatory aim if it is understood as translation from one system of talking about things to another. This understanding of the explanatory task does allow for complexity and, generally, most interesting theories of human behaviour attempt just this kind of reduction.

In any case however, my concern is not with explanation here, but rather with what might be called a de jure concern: on what grounds do we call the disorder of forces a disorder? The ‘disorder of forces’ model of compulsion treats addiction as a technical problem, of discovering the right combination of counterforces to it. This is absolutely fine and of obvious practical use to those who are subject to such forces. Fundamentally the questions raised are of the form: given some state a we take to be a stable state, or ideal conditions state, here is how force F affects a and here is how force F’ affects F. So the model sidesteps entirely the issue of why anyone should care about it, that is, it does not give us any clues about why this configuration of forces is disorderly; it does not go to the heart of the wrongness that is both experienced at the personal level and socially as something that hurts.

The disease model of compulsion can help address the de jure concern, because disease comes with its own version of what good is lacking when there is disease; for example the good of the being who suffers. In both the pull and push scenarios depicted above, what matters is not just that Jan cannot resist the forces, but that some effects are wanted and others unwanted. The effect of gravity's pull is wanted when Jan walks, but unwanted when she slips into the river. What is wanted is viewed as good by the agent and what is unwanted as bad. The disease model of addiction allows us to separate forces acting on individuals that are wanted from those that are unwanted and it does so on the basis of identifying a configuration of forces as disorderly precisely from the perspective of those who are afflicted by them (see Leshner Reference Leshner1997): the relation of the addict to the substances (Hoffman and Froemke Reference Hoffman and Froemke2007) or activities she is addicted to is comparable to getting an infection, it is something the person undergoes and does not want because the condition of being a patient in both cases hurts and is experienced as such by the patient herself.

The disease model is mildly revisionist with respect to how we treat addicts and addiction. Given the chronic nature of addiction, it would make sense to consider it as a long-term impairment or disability and to treat it accordingly, for example, by paying addicts an allowance, but there is currently no such provision. Perhaps there should be.Footnote ¹¹ Our social, cultural and legal attitudes may well be things we ought to change if the disease model is correct. So, how can we judge this? We cannot rely just on more empirical research, since the question is about categorisation not information; that is, we want to know under what category to put the information we gather. It is a matter of deciding whether ‘disease’ is apt or not.

One difficulty is that it is unclear what we are to count as symptoms of the disease and what is the disease itself, in particular, whether compulsion is a symptom of the disease or another word for the disease.Footnote ¹² This conceptual difficulty is not decisive against the disease model. Whooping cough, for example, is the disease and the description of the characteristic symptom and, if we go deeper to the pathogenic agent, Bordetella pertussis, it just means the bacterium from the genus Bordatella that causes persistent coughing. What matters however for the case of addiction is that merely adding a pathogeny to it, as the disease model promises to do, does not advance our understanding of compulsion. The notion of disease helps us home in on something having gone wrong with the agent, but it does not help us explain the nature of the wrong, we just have compulsion with the addition of some pathogenic mechanisms. The pathogenic mechanisms may explain the symptoms we class under ‘compulsion’ but not what is wrong with the behaviour; it is too coarse-grained to explain the wrongness of compulsion we associate with addiction. To put it differently, diseases of the various sorts that assail us can be seen as obstacles to our doing certain things and so as undesirable, at the very least, though there are rare individuals who can turn obstacles to opportunities. Be this as it may, the point we want to get clearer about is what is intrinsically negative about addiction, over and above its consequences for people's jobs or families and so on. In other words, we are seeking a deeper understanding of the specific character of ‘compulsion’ in addiction.

At this juncture, looking at the specific behavioural features the term compulsion describes in the addiction literature can help us get a better grip on it. Foddy (Reference Foddy2011) provides a helpful summary arguing that there are such main features: insensitivity to costs, reporting of desires that the addict cannot control and regret.Footnote ¹³

Insensitivity to costs has been extensively treated in the literature, in the context of rational choice theory (RCT). RCT aims to explain compulsion in addicts, not just diagnose insensitivity to costs. In an early formulation by Becker (Reference Becker1992), the theory states that the addict acts to maximize utility by consuming a substance that is pleasant; unfortunately, it just so happens that the substance (i) induces tolerance and (ii) reinforces its own consumption. So the addict weighs present goods heavily and discounts future costs. Discounting the future exponentially is standard in economic models, I value £100 now in my pocket more than £200 in a year.

But as Yaffe (Reference Yaffe2002) points out, discounting can be rational if the discounting matches the degree to which the futurity of the good places its acquisition at risk. Your offer of £100 now is more attractive because in a year a lot can happen, you may forget, change your mind, be too poor to honour your promise and so on. So the acquisition of the good is at risk and therefore I discount the future in favour of the present. In the case of the potential addict it is rational to discount the future to the extent that she can discount ending up as an addict. But given the odds of ending up as addict, on the RCT's own model, the theory's conception of ‘rational’ seems ‘to be entirely myopic’ (Yaffe Reference Yaffe2002: 189). In short, if the probability of addiction is very high, given the misery that goes with it, then it seems foolish, not rational, to discount it.

Compulsion, in the context of RCT, is part of the framing of the discounting theory, ex hypothesis we have a substance reinforcing its consumption. Whatever discounting the addict does appears to be epiphenomenal to this basic mechanism. As Foddy points out, for the theory to explain compulsive behaviour, we need to be shown that ‘addicts relate to costs and counter-incentives in a way that is structurally different and disordered, compared to a non-addict who places an extremely high value on drugs or some other good’ (Foddy Reference Foddy2011: 29). But we are not shown this, all the work is ultimately done by the substance. Still, what is useful about RCT models of addiction is the attempt to explain addiction without assuming the addict is irrational.

Reports of uncontrollable desires are versions of the ‘cannot be helped’ element we looked at before. We can drill down to this aspect of compulsion by considering the following challenge proposed by Pickard (Reference Pickard2012). Pickard argues that addiction is subject to a disjunct: either the addiction is controllable, or it is not an action (Pickard Reference Pickard2012: 42). Though Pickard's assumptions about action are questionable (see di Nucci Reference Di Nucci2014), she is on the right track in claiming that there is something wrong with the model of uncontrolled desires. The model is a replication, in an internal mental setting, of the earlier one citing external forces acting on the agent. It depends on what Wallace calls the ‘hydraulic model’ of willing (Wallace Reference Wallace1999: 634). It is attractive because it can explain how certain impulses have sufficient causal strength that would have prevailed, even if one had, counterfactually, the sorts of beliefs and desires that are needed for self-control; hence the need for powerful interventions to counteract their force. The difficulty is, as Wallace points out, that on this model there is no space for the agent to initiate a ‘regime of self-control’ (ibid.). Indeed it seems that at each stage of our analysis of compulsion, the addict qua agent is crushed out of the picture, her agential abilities only allowed to function to the extent that they serve her addiction, not as enabling her to do something about her very condition as addicted.

The most promising feature in terms of getting a more fine-grained analysis of compulsion is the third one: regret. It is promising because it does not just describe what some, or most, addicts do, but also places addiction squarely within the domain of action. Regret allows that the agent acted under some force they could not at that point resist, while it also suggests that they believe they ought to and could have done something about it. The various revisionist options we encountered earlier have no space for the experience of regret and so can only discount this ‘could’ as illusory. Yet the experience of regret is important because it speaks directly to the de jure concern in a way that the mere undesirability of disease does not. The possibility of regret suggests that something valuable is lost by the agent qua agent when she is an addict and this loss is worth regretting and makes sense regretting. This agential normative element is part of the idea of compulsion because compulsion invites the sense that it is something that one ought to resist; also it deals with the evaluative sense of why one may want to treat addiction, because the reason why one ought to resist compulsion is that it leads to a loss of some good that is worth having. That compulsion straddles the descriptive evaluative domains of discussion about addiction is, I believe, the deeper reason for its resilience in a domain that has seen such considerable change, as I tried to document here.

Compulsion is a problem in a context in which self-control is a good that is worth having and which it makes sense to aspire to have because it is within reach of ordinary vulnerable beings.Footnote ¹⁴

I.iii. Agent trouble

Using as a guide the notion of compulsion, we reach now a conceptually complex understanding of addiction as a phenomenon that combines the notion of a powerful force that subjugates the agent yet without entirely depriving her of the ability to do something about it, an ability which is somehow connected to willingness to take some action about her condition, and where lapses in willingness mark agential shortcomings, not just technical glitches. If this is on the right track, then we need to find a concept that describes compulsion in this way as an agential problem. In the philosophical literature, there two main candidates for this, coercion and akrasia.

Watson, in his 1999 discussion of addiction, starts by contrasting ‘compulsive’ with ‘voluntary’ (Watson Reference Watson1999: 603). This contrast leads him to analyse the compulsive element in terms of coercion, a move that is made more plausible by a discussion of the legal defence of duress that may be plausibly invoked by some addicts, even if it may not be extended to all (Watson Reference Watson1999: 619). The advantage of understanding compulsion in line with coercion is that it fits regret and the recognition of forces that overpower the addict. However, I do not think that this is a conceptually promising path. While I agree with Watson that duress and coercion contrast with ‘voluntary’ (see too Hyman Reference Hyman2015), I am not convinced that they are useful for understanding compulsion in the addiction context, because compulsion does not exhibit one feature of coercion which is essential to it, namely threat. As Nozick (Reference Nozick1997) has shown, I think convincingly, coercion requires a threat that is meant as a threat and understood as such.Footnote ¹⁵

Akrasia does not appear immediately promising, not least because it is a controversial topic. Generally, it is thought to occur when one's sincere judgement about what they should do, their evaluation of the situation, their view of what on the whole is good to do, simply does not guide their action; there is a disconnect between thought and deed.Footnote ¹⁶ For present purposes, I will use ‘judge a and do ~a’ as a placeholder that describes the symptom of akratic behaviour. Akrasia is discussed in connection to addiction by Wallace (Reference Wallace1999). Usually akrasia is explained by the presence of powerful desires that overwhelm the agent causing her not to do what she judged best to do. This takes us back to the forces like gravity, river currents, uncontrolled desires. A different take on akrasia, presented by Mele (Reference Mele2009), requires that a commitment to act is thwarted by uncompelled intentional motivation (see too Watson Reference Watson1977: 326). On the basis of this conception, Mele then argues that akrasia cannot be usefully brought to bear on the discussion of addiction.

This point can be granted without giving up on akrasia provided we seek to understand the latter as neither a matter of uncontrollable forces nor as a result of uncompelled motivation. Rather, and following the thread of the discussion so far, the concept we try to make sense of—or examine whether it can be made sense of—is ‘compulsion’, which captures a force that is powerful yet about which something can be done. Here is where Wallace's analysis is particularly helpful. Wallace claims that powerful desires can be conceptualized as quasi-perceptions that attract the agent's attention and focus it thus clouding her judgement, so when she acts she can act foolishly and in ways she regrets. Addiction, he suggests, can be thought of as a chronic variant of such an occurrence and so as producing a chronic evaluative defect. Although Wallace is not very clear on this, the suggestion is that the defect does not entirely disable the addict's evaluative and executive abilities, otherwise, if the defect is permanent the possibility of change or resistance—and relapse—would not arise.

I believe that akrasia is a convincing model for understanding compulsion in the case of addiction because it recognizes the complexity of the addict's exercise of her agency: The addict wants substance x or to engage in activity x. But she does not consider x-ing to be a good. She also wants not to x (or to stop x-ing), precisely because she does not consider x good. But she xs nonetheless, because she finds herself attracted to x, so she sees some good in her x-ing.Footnote ¹⁷

In addition, akrasia fits with the phenomena identified by Foddy, insensitivity to costs, reports of uncontrollable desires, and regret, without oversimplifying compulsion and shutting the agent out of the phenomenon. To take each in turn, the addict goes against her better judgement about the costs of pursuing this rather than that course of action, she wants to do one thing and finds herself doing another, as if pushed by a powerful force, and she has regrets about paths not taken that she judges she ought to, and could have, taken.

The danger, of course, is that these features of akrasia that I present as advantages are just another way of muddying the waters, that is to say, neither compulsion, nor its diagnostic substitute, akrasia, are straightforward or uncontested notions. So it is not clear whether any explanatory gains have been made by bringing compulsion in addiction and akrasia together. A second possibly problematic area is that if addiction is understood as a variant of akrasia then it can licence the sort of moralising about addiction that threatens both programmes of rehabilitation that aim to enhance the addict's abilities of self-control and of research into drugs that counteract effects of specific substances, i.e., both behavioural and straightforwardly causal interventions. The question then is whether trying for a middle ground in which addiction is understood as liable to normative and evaluative considerations, rather than either as a moral flaw or a disorder of forces, is worth doing. I shall return to this in the last section; what follows next is a brief presentation of Hegel's account of action, which provides the tools for an answer to this question.

II.i. Some problems with GG

In classical and medieval philosophy, GG is something of a default position. GG is a thesis about the nature of the will—or desire or action. It states that the will—or desire or action—is guided by some aspect of goodness. In its twentieth-century revival, GG will or desire are substituted by practical states and intentions. In this contemporary version GG stands for some evaluation—whether a belief that something is good or a perception of goodness—that guides the agent's action. Basically the thesis claims that there is a link between motivation and evaluation.Footnote ¹⁸

The theory is usually challenged by examples of agents who do not appear to be motivated under an aspect of goodness. Typically such agents exhibit one or the other of the following pathologies: akrasia, diabolism or indifferentism. The akratic acts voluntarily against her better judgment, so, by her lights, her choice is sub-optimal. The diabolic agent acts voluntarily on a reason she knows to be bad and which she chooses because it is bad. The indifferentist does not care one way or another, her motivation remains unaffected by her evaluations, that is, she may judge x good and y bad and still be disposed to be guided by a throw of dice; her choice is in the circumstances ‘blind’.Footnote ¹⁹ These pathologies illustrate a break between motivation and evaluation, and so between practical states leading to and sustaining action and estimations of goodness. Put in a more positive way: an extra step is required to connect motivation and evaluation.

Although the point about the extra step is usually presented in the context of the psychology of agency, it is really a conceptual one, it is the upshot of the difference between something wanted, desired, intended, and something worth wanting, desiring, intending. Denying this conceptual distinction leaves the proponent of GG to argue that deep down the agent does want what is worth having, which requires either some supra-agential guarantee or deliberation about the good to precede all actions. Neither is usually thought to be an attractive position to end up in.Footnote ²⁰

II.ii. GG in the Philosophy of Right

Hegel's commitment to GG is spelled out at the start of the ‘Morality’ section in the Philosophy of Right: ‘the absolute end of the will, [is] the Good’ (PR: §114, 79). Later on, Hegel specifies that ‘[f]or the subjective will the good and the good alone is essential’ (PR: §131, 87) and that ‘[t]he particular subject is related to the good as the essence of his will’ (PR: §133, 89). Given the context, it is reasonable to assume that Hegel might be talking of moral willing, in which case the claim would be uninterestingly true. Note however that the topic, individual and subjective willing, occurs at this precise juncture because it aims at the good and not the other way around. In other words, subjective and individual willing allows for a different perspective to open up on right and wrong than that which is available in the preceding section on abstract right; it allows for a perspective from which the good links internally with the will, rather than appear externally imposed.Footnote ²¹

Hegel defends GG through an analysis of how the will shows itself in action [Handlung] (PR: §113, see too EM: §113). The theoretical question he is addressing is ‘what is an action?’. Hegel's answer is that an action is something that can be recognized by a subject as her action. A transitionally important notion for this conclusion is deed [Tat]. A deed is something done, ‘an event, a situation which has been produced’ (PR: §115R). The deed ‘sets up an alteration’ in the subject's environment (PR: §115, see too E: §505) that confronts the will as something that can be owned by a subject—’be known to me as my action’ (PR: §113, 78). Willing is in some sense then a form of ownership. This is of obvious relevance in the context of the ‘Morality’ section, given that establishing what is mine is necessary for attributions of responsibility. But one reason why I called the question Hegel tackles here ‘theoretical’ is to highlight the meta-normative strand of the argument. To anticipate somewhat, the solution to the problem how a deed can be known as someone's action is that the concept of the will is the good. The argument leading to this solution can be reconstructed in terms of three main steps:

1. a. Deeds are actions, if deeds are intentional.

2. b. Deeds are intentional, if they realize some end presented to the agent as worth pursuing.

3. c. An end is presented to the agent as worth pursuing, if it links up with the good.

I will examine briefly the arguments in support of each step.Footnote ²²

a. Deeds are actions, if deeds are intentional. The first step starts with the notion of a deed, something that minimally involves some occurrence, ‘an alteration’, which is publicly observable. The usual division, inherited from early modern philosophy, is that there is an outer world of publicly observable objects, which is distinct from the inner world, typically available through introspection. Hegel nods in that direction when using notions such as ‘externalisation’ of the agent's will (PR: §113). But here we start from the outside, so to speak, and make our way to the subject as agent so that the deed can be properly identified as hers. Locating an agent in a dynamic environment, however, is not easy, because any ‘event’ or ‘a situation which has been produced, is a concrete external actuality, which because of its concreteness has in it an indeterminable multiplicity of factors’ (PR: §115R). In other words, there are causally active forces, ‘agents’, wherever we look! As Hegel puts it: ‘Any and every single element which appears as the condition, ground or cause of one such factor, and so has contributed its share to the event in question, may be looked upon as responsible for the event or at least sharing responsibility for it’ (ibid.). The notion that promises to carve out the environment into occurrences that are actions and those that are not, thereby picking out agents in the relevant sense, that is, of authors of actions, is intention [Absicht].

But what is intention? If a deed is an action provided it is intentional, then we do not seem to have advanced very much—aside that is from re-naming actions as intentional deeds. Here is a dense passage in which Hegel ties all these elements together:

This passage summarizes the issues about ownership and then proposes the ‘right of intention’ as a way forward. In the Philosophy of Right, where he presents the matter more systematically, Hegel explains that the ‘right of intention’ names the ‘universal quality of the action’ as is ‘known by the agent and so shall have lain from the start in his subjective will’ (PR: §120). The claim is that the agent knows what she is doing under some general description of the performance. Presumably it is called a ‘right’ because if some deed is to count as an action, the agent should be in a position to answer at least a ‘what?’ question about what she did—the relevant contrast class here being unintended effects or absent-minded doings. Asserting this rather unexceptional right hardly settles the issue of intention, the same deed (e.g., arm movement) can be any number of actions expressing any number of intentions (e.g., waving, calling for help, threatening, ritual summoning of demons, etc.). Moreover, agents can be unreliable, obtuse, deceitful, self-serving. This is why Hegel introduces the ‘right of objectivity’, the action ‘as known and willed by the subject as thinker’ (ibid.). This right asserts the expectation of a more demanding sense of self-knowledge than asserted by the right of intention. The agent must be in a position to show how the general description of the action she gives meshes with the publicly observable occurrence (e.g., a limp arm movement does not mesh with ‘threat’). This sort of agential self-knowledge has several aspects, all nested together: for example, the agent must know how to do whatever it is she is doing, this kind of knowledge in turn requires connecting the ‘what’ in a reasonable way to the causal chains of which the agent is part, and finally, the agent must know about the foreseeable effects of some of these chains. The point of this right is to alert us to the fact that at every step of the way the agent and her intentions are rooted in the physical and social world of which her action is part. At the same time, this rootedness is part of the agent's self-knowledge as agent. The problem with it is the fluidity of dynamic environments in which agents act, which present as webs of causes and effects and which seem to escape any single agent's purview.

b. Deeds are intentional, if they realize some end presented to the agent as worth pursuing. The notion of intention has a natural telic aspect to it, so it is reasonable to seek from the agent an end-citing answer to get clear about her intention: ‘what are you up to?’ or ‘what is this for?’.

The idea of purpose [Vorsatz] allows telic considerations to bear on the discussion of intentional action and with the introduction of telic considerations, questions of evaluation become relevant. The assumption is that the agent is pursuing a purpose because she considers it worth doing, which expresses a very basic version of GG. This version is basic only in the sense that there is no commitment yet about the precise form of GG, there is simply the assumption that follow-up questions, such as ‘why did you think this to be a good idea?’ have a place in this discussion about intentional action. In the Philosophy of Right the main candidates guiding evaluations about what is ‘worth’ doing are the agent's ‘interest’ (PR: §122), well-being [Wohl] (PR: §123). Ideas concerning the agent's well-being have a plausible telic role in the agent's practical thinking and can generate reasons for her to do things. So this type of consideration enables the agent to answer evaluative questions by citing her belief that such and such activity promotes her well-being.

However, again a mismatch can arise between subjective and objective evaluations; agents can get things wrong about their well-being, interest, and happiness. Sadly, this is another unexceptional point about action, we want things we think will make us happy but which do not; we think we want things it turns out we do not really want and so on. Hegel tries to turn this situation to a dialectical advantage so that if the agent does come to the realisation that she got her interest [Wohl] wrong, she can begin to get hold of a notion of goodness that is more encompassing than interest and well-being. This is the notion of the good [das Gute] (PR: §129).

c. An end is presented to the agent as worth pursuing if it links up with the good. With this last step, it becomes clear just how demanding the objectivity standards Hegel expects agents to meet are if they are to know themselves as agents and claim rightful ownership of the action. The argument that leads up to the good is, at least as I present it here, a regressive argument of conditions that could be seen to represent deepening self-knowledge on the part of the agent. The final step is the idea that however defective specific instances of practical reasoning might be, to act intentionally is not just to have an idea of what one is doing and how that meshes with webs of causes and effects but also to have some reason for why one is doing what one is doing and be in principle able to evaluate their evaluations. It is not just that agents can be wrong about what they think of ‘subjective worth or interest’ (PR: §122), it is also the case that the type of reason such subjective worth or interest generates is always provisional, since, to put it crudely, interest and subjective worth are indexed to want, not to the good. Stated a bit more carefully: the chains of justifications the agent can adduce for her actions on the basis of interest tend to transform every action to a means for some further end, which ‘may in its turn be reduced to a means to some further intention and so on ad infinitum’ (PR: §122).

One may ask, what is wrong with this content-neutral practical reasoning? The only thing that is wrong with it is that justifications run out, and so the demand that the agent adduces some reasons is not met. At some point the agent is stamped and has nothing to say about why she is doing what she is doing. The underlying thought is that unless there is a regress stopper the questioning itself will be corrosive and its effect will go downwards leaving the local accounts the agent is able to give vulnerable to self-doubt. Is it plausible to think that if a connection to the good cannot be found then all is lost? Probably not but recall that for Hegel we started with the question of how to claim a deed as one's own, so the discussion is placed from the start in an intensive, justification-demanding, forensic context. The regress stopper is a substantive notion of the good: ‘The particular subject is related to the good as the essence of his will’ (PR: §133). Hence for the action to be owned it must be possible for the agent to act under the guise of the good in the sense that she must have access to a final objective substantive notion of the good.

The obvious sceptical rejoinder is: ‘well, too bad for ownership!’ I want now to argue that Hegel is not blind to this and rather reaches a similar conclusion as far as individual agents are concerned. In the Philosophy of Right, GG is not a thesis about individuals. It is applicable to—and intellectually demanding for—individuals because it sets a standard towards which individuals can strive but cannot reach qua individuals. The reason for this is not that individuals are inherently flawed, but simply that the good is not a matter of merely individual willing and doing. This is why the ‘Morality’ section of the Philosophy of Right gives way to Sittlichkeit and the problems with individual agency are presented as soluble under conditions of collective, communal, institutional types of agency.

This is not a hugely useful result for our purposes, though, because it suggests that the addict whose behaviour can be described as akratic is just the unlucky subject of contingent factors, so if we want to understand her behaviour as such we need to go back to the empirical material we considered in section one. I want to show now that Hegel also has a conceptual analysis of the sort of agent trouble we called akrasia, and that this can be found in the section in the Logic on ‘The Idea of the Good’.

II.iii. The gappiness problem

The main claim that Hegel defends in this section is that the idea of the good can only be true if the good is fully realized or made ‘actual’ [wirklich]. Anything short of this is the source of meta-normative and normative problems. Already this truncated summary of the argument shows that the actual good is out of reach of individuals or even local collectives, it is a very demanding notion that consists in everything that is good and nothing that is bad. At the same time, Hegel does not consider it out of reach of human effort: the idea of the good is practical, that is, it aims at its realisation as a determinate state of affairs (SL: 729/12.231) and individuals, singly or collectively, are capable of grasping this idea and so its practicality, its to-be-doneness.Footnote ²³ This is how willing, which is not a logical notion, is connected to this discussion: willing is the means by which individuals are able to grasp this practical notion. The essence of willing is the good just because the good is a practical idea and this thoughtful practicality for individuals is only available through willing.

Let us now look at the argument in more detail. There is a basic shape of a problem that concerns Hegel, which as we shall see has ramifications for individuals owning their actions and for various pathologies of action at the individual level. Here is how he presents it:

The background to this diagnosis of ‘restriction’, ‘particularisation’, and ‘finitude’ is the thought that the idea of the good is an idea of a good that is absolute or, in a different vocabulary, unconditioned. The basic meta-normative commitment is that enquiring after the good makes sense. Given now this commitment, any actual determination of a will by the good is only by a finite good, this good. This seems like such an obvious point to make and one that has negligible significance. Hegel uses this to argue that this basic asymmetry is responsible for all sorts of outcomes, ‘if the good is again also fixed as something finite, and is essentially such, then, notwithstanding its inner infinity, it too canot escape the fate of finitude—a fate that manifests itself in several forms’ (SL: 731/12.232). One of these is the abandonment of the idea of the good in favour of goods, which are accidentally so, given certain purposes we have. Another is the consideration of reality as void of worth, in an attempt to save the objectivity of the good by removing it from worldly constraints, and so on.

Hegel develops a formal version of this diagnosis of a mismatch between the good and finite, restricted, particular goods in his discussion of practical syllogism, that is, which earns its place here because it is the practical shape of thought. The form of practical syllogism promises to offer an orderly and non-mysterious way to connect whatever is to be our major premise, containing the idea of the good, with some end that realizes the good. The problem of restriction however reappears and it looks as if it is an intrinsic feature of the form of practical syllogism. This is because there is a gap between the first premise, which states some infinitely good ‘absolute purpose’ ‘in and for itself’ (SL: 731/12.233), and the restricted good that is given in the second premise and which is the good to be realized in the conclusion. The cause of the problem is not ‘external contingency’ and ‘evil’ but rather ‘collision and conflict in the good itself’ (SL: 731/12.232). This collision and conflict are generated by the good because the good is at once absolute and something particular, or, in a different vocabulary, an unconditional ‘ought’ and something that has a lot going for it.

Let us call this the ‘gappiness problem’. Gappiness is a conceptual problem—hence it earns its place in the logical analysis of the good. To understand it we can start with the distinction, mentioned at the outset between something wanted and something worth wanting. One way of understanding the gappiness problem is to see how this distinction is not, despite first impressions, really very deep. Something wanted is something for which some reason can be given however defeasible. So it belongs within the same continuum conceptually with something worth wanting. What is worth wanting has more reasons, perhaps less easily defeasible reasons, perhaps conclusive reasons going for it. The difference Hegel is pointing at is between something that has one, a few, or many reasons going for it—which is what he calls ‘content’ in this section of the Logic—and something that is the good. This difference emerges in the practical syllogism as a gap between the first premise, which refers to the good as such, expressing the basic commitment that one's actions be guided by the good and the second premise by which some content is generated for a specific action or type of action under the guise of the good. So what interests Hegel here is not the difference between goods that appear subjectively to be so and may turn out to be illusory and, on the other hand, goods that are of better standing so to speak, of proven worth. Certainly this difference matters and can lead to all sorts of practical trouble. But the difference between the good and some goods points at a structural problem for moralities, like Hegel's, which are committed to an absolute objective good.Footnote ²⁴

The gappiness problem is relevant to akrasia. To see the relevance we need to see how this conceptual point Hegel makes can apply to human behaviour, with all the epistemic, psychological, and spatio-temporal conditions under which agents find themselves. On the model proposed, the akratic agent can have a sense of a good that transcends her limitations and at the same time hold to and act on a notion of a good that is tightly indexed to her circumstances.Footnote ²⁵ She can think that really the most good is to put an end to her addiction, yet also that succumbing has something going for it. In a very schematic way of putting it, ‘most good’ is for the agent a set of reasons that should be sufficient for acting. ‘Most good’ is not the same as the absolute, objective good; it is what stands in its place for ordinary agents. So it stands for the general premise of the syllogism. The agent does not act accordingly though. Under certain conditions, the endless list of circumstances that lead agents astray, she finds a reason to act and acts in a way that goes contrary to her idea of most good. She has a reason to do what she does, what she lacks by her own lights is sufficient reason. While going against her better judgement is perverse and wayward, it is not conceptually puzzling because on the Hegelian account, there are always reasons beyond those caught in the subject's deliberations. This is not because the good is reason-transcending, it is because its full content is beyond the reach of individual deliberations and actions. Another way of looking at what Hegel contributes to this discussion is this: his analysis of the good helps dissociate the notion of ‘sufficient reasons for x’ from the notion of the good: sufficient reasons are always about some good, and if some good gives us sufficient reasons, then some other good, much less well supported by reasons can, unfortunately, also give reasons for action. The key difference between pathology and ordinary agency is that in the latter cases the agents do act on what they think is most good or what they consider as giving them sufficient reasons for action. Still, on the Hegelian picture, this is a kind of failure since rational agents seek to know and will the good, and despite their best efforts they cannot bring it about single-handed.Footnote ²⁶