Rachel Frenette

In this chapter, I argue that Lennart Nordenfelt’s theory of mental illness is not convincing when applied to the disorder of addiction. There are two main reasons for this, which relate to his characterization of the notions of rationality and compulsion. In short, according to Nordenfelt, addicted individuals, such as alcoholics, are mentally ill because they are compelled to act on an irrational want. Their want is irrational because it is self-destructive, and they are compelled because they could not avoid intending to act on this want. I take it that these two statements – on the irrationality of addicted individuals’ and on their being compelled – are wrong, or at least not completely true. I do not dispute the fact that addicted individuals are, or can be, mentally ill. However, I do not think it is a matter of irrationality, nor of compulsion, on their part. Refuting Nordenfelt’s conception of mental illness applied to addiction suggests that we need another justification to claim that this condition is, or at least can be, a disorder. Consequently, I propose the view according to which our reasons to count addiction as a disorder relate to the identification of a harmful and repetitive pattern of behavior.

Cet article montre qu’il n’y a pas de bonnes raisons de maintenir qu’il existe des degrés de responsabilité morale. Les quatre voies argumentatives possibles pour admettre que la responsabilité morale existe par degrés dépendent toutes d’un modèle strawsonien de la responsabilité morale, et se concentrent sur des conditions nécessaires à cette responsabilité. La première voie argumentative porte sur la condition de contrôle, la deuxième sur la condition d’excusabilité, la troisième sur la « correctitude » et la quatrième sur la blâmabilité. Aucune n’est concluante. J’établis en effet que, d’une part, toutes ces voies argumentatives échouent à distinguer entre ce qui fonde la responsabilité et la responsabilité elle-même; et d’autre part, elles s’appuient sur une identification incorrecte de ce qui est susceptible de degrés.

Dans cet article, nous soutenons l’idée selon laquelle la nostalgie peut être bénéfique pour les personnes addictes dans leur démarche de guérison. À cette fin, nous définissons d’abord ce que peut vouloir signifier la guérison pour les personnes addictes. Ensuite, nous proposons une conception de la nostalgie, proche de celle de Felipe De Brigard (2018) et que nous qualifions de « nostalgie nouvelle révisée ». Puis, nous utilisons cette conception de la nostalgie pour l’appliquer au cas de l’addiction, et nous expliquons que la personne addicte pourrait bénéficier de ressentir de la nostalgie selon trois scénarios potentiels. Le tout nous permet de mettre en lumière le fait qu’il y a toujours dans la nostalgie – et ainsi, de manière fidèle à son étymologie – une forme de désir de retourner à quelque chose, à savoir à ce qui nous tient à cœur.

In this article, I argue that the object of agent-regret is the self. Therefore, to regret is to feel pained by the fact that we were moved by reasons to act that do not move us anymore. In the literature, the object of regret has been identified otherwise, for instance as mistakes or as unchosen valuable paths of actions. However, these views are inadequate in addressing certain cases of regret that appear nevertheless paradigmatical, such as cases of conflicting values, cases of recurrent patterns of regret and cases of aesthetic regret. One implication of defining the object of regret as the self is that it is virtually unavoidable. I also address three potential objections to my account of regret and demonstrate how they can be overcome.

In this article, I show that the experience of addictive desires, which I also refer to as cravings, is similar to the experience of the state of being in love or of limerence. In other words, I argue that some part of the experience of addiction resembles some part of the experience of romantic love. Many in the literature have tried to show that one can be addicted to love in the way that love constitutes an addiction. Yet, none seem to have taken the opposite route, which takes love not as an object of addiction, nor as something that can be reduced to it, but rather as a model from which we can understand addiction. This is odd, as such a perspective is warranted by first-person accounts of addiction. Therefore, in my view, addiction is like love, and not the other way around. Nevertheless, it is not addiction as a whole that is similar to love; love in itself cannot be compared to addiction: it is precisely the experience of addictive cravings in addiction that is like limerence. In order to put forward the similarities between experiences of cravings and experiences of limerence, I go through the basic components of limerence as described by Dorothy Tennov (1979), and prove that they are found in the experience of cravings. This comparison between the two phenomena allows me to introduce the notion of reciprocation in the addiction literature.