Second-order preferences as addiction, cont. (part 4 of “what is addiction” dialog tree)

by Carl V Phillips

This post continues immediately from the previous one, which you will need to read to make sense of this.  That, in turn, is part of the “dialog tree” of how to talk to someone about what they think addiction is (starting here), which in turn follows from this post.  Got all that?

In the previous post, I pointed out that one thing that people often mean when they say “addiction” is that someone chooses smoking over not smoking, but “wants to quit”.  I pointed out that this almost certainly means they have a second-order preference for wanting to prefer not smoking over smoking, but that is not their actual preference.

I emphasized one critical point that is often overlooked when this concept is implicitly invoked as an excuse for torturing smokers into quitting:  Most everyone has been tricked into believing that every smoker who manages to quit will find himself just as happy/alert/clear-headed/etc. when he abstinent as he was when he smoked.  While this will be true for some people who give up tobacco/nicotine, it is definitely not true for many.  In particular, it is almost certainly not true for those who “want to quit” but start again after a period of abstinence.

In a hundred different ways, this lie permeates discussions about use and cessation (“all you need is just a little help getting over that hurdle”).  The lie dooms countless smokers — literally millions of them — to a repeated cycle of temporary abstinence, expecting to find that they no longer want to smoke after being abstinent for a while, followed by starting to smoke again because they still prefer smoking to abstinence.  But it is also one of the fundamental anti-THR lies that I have written about before:  Everyone would be happy being abstinent, and so they just need to get there; thus, we do not need THR.  (Actually, this claim is wrong for other reasons too, actually, but I will stick to the one theme.)

Circling back to the dialog tree of what to say to a non-ANTZ who invokes the old “…but they are still addicted” claim as a reason for opposing THR, when someone defines “addiction” with answer #6, how should we respond?  I took so long getting to this because I think it is necessary to really understand the implications of second-order preferences in order to answer well.  With the background in mind, the script for responding should begin with:

If someone says they want to quit but never does, or they quit for a while and start again, it shows that they actually prefer smoking to abstinence when those are the only two choices.  But there is a good chance they would act on their stated desire to quit, and stick with it, if given a way to make non-smoking better — that is, to keep some of the advantages of smoking.  That makes such a smoker the perfect candidate for THR.  Indeed, it is difficult to think of any more compelling reason to support THR than this notion of “addiction”.

If you can get to this point in a conversation with any thinking and feeling person (i.e., most any non-ANTZ), I venture to say that you will almost certainly win them over.

This argument renders the point about whether someone is “still addicted” rather moot.  But should the conversation continue to focus on addiction, the argument only becomes stronger:

Not only is THR a good way, and perhaps the only way, to help such an individual fulfill their stated desire to quit smoking, but it is the only way to actually overcome the addiction.  The abstinent ex-smoker whose preferences fit this pattern is still addicted by this definition, because his preferences have not changed — he still would prefer to smoke even though he is forcing himself to act like someone who prefers to not smoke.  However, if he is satisfied with THR, then not only is he no longer a smoker, but he is no longer “addicted”.

Just pause for a moment and let that sink in, because I think that these points might well be the strongest arguments for THR that are almost never made.

Having let it sink in, I have to finish with one caveat.  Arguably it is necessary to add something about the impact of past use to answer #6, since some reference to past use is part of most notions of what addiction might mean (recall definition #5 in particular, and also #4).  Thus it might be that the full version needs to be something like:

6a. Someone is addicted when he prefers taking particular action even though he would prefer to prefer to quit, and the reason he prefers the action is because of past consumption.

That is, someone is “addicted” to smoking if he has that pattern of preference and second-order preference, and because he ended up with that pattern because of past smoking.  It should be immediately apparent that this is of no practical consequence if we are talking about someone who already fits this description.  There is no changing the past.  The only change required is to add the phrase “since he is already in that situation” to the above arguments.

However, if this describes someone’s belief about tobacco/nicotine use (which I believe is the case for many who are anti-tobacco but not ANTZ, and who are thoughtful enough to figure out what they are really claiming), and they believe that the creation of the second-order preference disconnect is truly a terrible thing in itself, then this concept of “addiction” remains an argument for preventing anyone from initiating use of even a low-risk product.  I do not actually think that this is a good argument, but I will acknowledge that it could be defended because, unlike the ANTZ, I am not just spewing propaganda, but am seeking honest understanding of these issues.

The reasons I think it is a very weak argument start with the observation that, as noted in the previous post, there is nothing inherently terrible or unusual about having a second-order preference to have a different preference about some choice.  I used to drink orange juice that I mixed from those little cans of frozen concentrate, but then I got in the habit of buying the jugs of “premium, never frozen” juice, and now strongly prefer that.  But I would prefer to still like the frozen concentrate just as much, since it is cheaper and easier to carry and store, but my experience changed my tastes.  But that experience also left me happier, since the premium stuff really is better.  My indulgence caused a second-order preference disconnect, but did not make me worse off.

The typical response to that observation would be that tobacco use is different because it causes not merely the discovery you like something and an evolution of tastes, but rather it causes some strange massive reprogramming of your brain.  It is not clear why that even matters, though, and moreover  I am not entirely convinced by these claims.  Most of them come out of the notoriously dishonest ANTZ “research” literature or the brain porn research in neurochemistry that is currently in vogue but is widely derided for not actually supporting the claims that are made.  Yes, tobacco/nicotine use changes our brains, but so does acquiring a taste for orange juice or reading a book (if you remember what you read, it changed your brain).  The bottom line is that there is a possible argument against tobacco to be found here, but even the factual claims are far from definitive, and the ethical and economic conclusions are much shakier still.  After all, there is also a valid case to be made that someone’s exposure to tobacco/nicotine can improve their life by making them susceptible to the benefits, so long as they can get those benefits without the high cost of smoking.  So perhaps I should complain that I was denied that opportunity to reprogram my brain at an early age, just as I wish I had learned to speak Mandarin when I was still young enough to do it easily.

But I digress.  That is a topic for another day.  At the end of this day I will sum up the thread by saying that if you can get an open-minded person to discuss their concerns about “addiction”, and you can offer the responses presented in this series, there is a very good chance that you can show them that the concept  of addiction offers much stronger arguments in favor of THR than it does against it.