Is Addiction Motivational or Volitional?

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the False Dichotomy

There is a peculiar comedy to the way humans approach difficult questions. Confronted with the bewildering complexity of, say, consciousness or love or why anyone willingly eats canned anchovies, we instinctively reach for the smallest possible box and try to cram the phenomenon inside. Nature or nurture. Free will or determinism. Cake or death. We seem genetically (or environmentally — see what I did there?) predisposed to binary thinking, as though the universe were a Scantron test administered by a particularly impatient deity.

Nowhere is this tendency more painfully on display than in the debate over addiction. Ask any reasonably sober dinner party of clinicians, philosophers, and theologians whether addiction is motivational or volitional, and you will witness the kind of intellectual carnage usually reserved for academic conferences and Thanksgiving with in-laws. One camp insists the addict wants the drug too much. The other insists the addict can’t help wanting the drug at all. Both camps will then look at you expectantly, as though you are supposed to pick a team and buy a jersey.

I would like to propose, gently and with as much pastoral patience as I can muster, that this dichotomy is nonsense. Or, to be slightly more diplomatic: it is a question that has been smuggled into the wrong courtroom and is being tried under the wrong laws.

Let’s Stop Being So Myopic

Yes, nature matters. Yes, nurture matters. Genetics loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger, and epigenetics apparently sneaks in afterward to rearrange the bullets while everyone is looking the other way (Peeke, 2014). What’s striking about contemporary addiction science is not how much we know but how cheerfully we ignore most of it the moment we sit down to argue with each other.

The motivational camp, ably represented by Baumeister, Nadal, and colleagues, argues that addiction is fundamentally about wanting (Baumeister et al., 2017). The addict’s volition is intact; he is simply running a cost-benefit analysis in which the benefit of the next drink consistently outranks the cost of cirrhosis, divorce, and a public meltdown at his daughter’s bat mitzvah. The math is bad, but the calculator works.

The volitional camp, represented by Carnes (2012) and a battalion of neuroscientists led by clinicians like Daniel Amen, counters that this calculator has been dropped in a swimming pool. The brain, after repeated exposure to a rewarding behavior, undergoes structural changes so dramatic that the word “choice” becomes a kind of cruel joke (Amen, 2016). To ask the late-stage addict to simply choose otherwise is like asking a man in a falling elevator to simply choose to fly.

Both camps are correct. Both camps are also incomplete. And here is where things get philosophically interesting.

Maybe the Argument for Choice Versus No Choice Is Trivial

Define addiction neuroscientifically and you get a tidy, mostly satisfying story: a behavior stimulates the brain’s reward circuitry, the circuitry adapts, dependence ensues, and the once-pleasurable behavior becomes a kind of grim biological obligation. Fine. Beyond that point, however, the scientific method becomes oddly mute. It can describe the dopamine. It cannot tell you whether the man bowing before his bottle is responsible for his bowing.

For that, we have to wander out of the laboratory and into the philosophical thicket, where the brambles are labeled in Greek and the path is lit by candles held by long-dead Frenchmen. Here we trade microscopes for language, and “choice” becomes a word whose meaning we must hammer out before we can use it. This is the deconstructionist’s playground. It is also, frankly, a bit of a swamp.

Which is why it’s worth noticing that this modern, linguistically-bound approach is not necessarily better than older ways of explicating addiction — it is merely different. The ancients were not less rigorous; they were rigorous about different things. Where we now perform linguistic surgery on the word “will,” they performed something closer to spiritual autopsy on the condition of the soul. Their tools were paradox and parable rather than peer review, but they were aiming at the same target: the strange spectacle of a human being doing what he does not want to do.

(St. Paul, incidentally, summarized addiction in Romans 7 about nineteen centuries before the DSM caught up: “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing.” You could put that on a recovery chip and not lose a syllable.)

The Medieval Wisdom of Sexaholics Anonymous

It turns out that one of the most precise definitions of addiction in the modern world comes not from a peer-reviewed journal but from a recovery fellowship that meets in church basements and smells faintly of bad coffee. Sexaholics Anonymous, in their characteristically blunt fashion, defines lust as “an attitude demanding that a natural instinct serve unnatural desires” (Sexaholics Anonymous, 2001, p. 40).

Read that sentence twice. Then read it a third time, because it is doing more philosophical work than most graduate theses.

What SA has done, with the kind of economy that only people who have hit rock bottom can afford, is locate the motivational engine of addiction in a posture — an attitude — rather than in a chemical or a behavior. The natural instinct (hunger, desire, the longing for connection) is not the problem. The problem is the demand placed upon it: that it carry weights it was never designed to carry.

Denial of this fact, they continue, hardens into blindness — and here is where volition collapses. One becomes unwilling, and eventually unable, to see what is actually happening. Pride, in this older vocabulary, gives birth to lust because it pulls a person out of their natural habitat — out of relational, communal humanity — and leaves them stranded on the small, cold island of the self.

Or as Pascal put it with characteristic economy: “Pride turns you away from God; lust binds you to yourself.”

The genius of this framing is that it dissolves the motivational/volitional debate by refusing to play. The motivation is real (the natural instinct is good and necessary). The volition is real (the person genuinely chooses the first few drinks, the first few clicks, the first few hits). But somewhere along the way the attitude — the demand that the natural instinct perform supernatural feats of consolation — corrupts both. Motivation becomes obsession. Volition becomes blindness. And the person, having once chosen to set out across the water, finds they have forgotten how to swim.

When the Natural Goes Sideways

Consider the everyday geometry of how this happens:

• Sex was designed to bond two people. Used to medicate loneliness, it becomes a solvent that dissolves connection rather than building it.
• Food was designed to nourish. Used to swallow depression, it becomes a tomb with a lovely buffet.
• Shopping was designed — well, perhaps not designed for anything noble, but at minimum it was designed to acquire necessary goods. Used to conquer anxiety, it becomes a Sisyphean exercise in retail therapy that ends with thirty unopened Amazon boxes and a credit card bill that requires professional therapy.

In each case, the natural instinct is being asked to do a job it was never qualified for. And — here is the cruel twist — it works. In the short term, it works beautifully. The lonely man does, for a brief shining moment, feel less lonely. The anxious woman does, for a brief shining moment, feel less anxious. The depressed teenager does, for a brief shining moment, feel less depressed.

This is not a system failure. This is the system working too well. The natural instinct is so effective at producing momentary relief that the brain, ever the efficient bureaucrat, files away the strategy under “things that work” and reaches for it again the next time discomfort arrives. And again. And again. Until reaching for it requires no thought at all, and the volitional architecture has quietly been remodeled around the addiction like a house built around a sleeping bear.

This is why the SA definition lands so hard: the addict is not addicted to the substance or the behavior. The addict is addicted to a worldview — a worldview that whole-heartedly trusts and deploys this strategy of exploitation. That worldview is rightly called pride: the lone-wolf conviction that one can, must, and should handle one’s own pain alone, with whatever tools come to hand.

The Problem Centers in the Mind (and the Mind Is Not Alone)

Here is the punchline that makes the whole thing click. Natural instincts can only be properly satisfied in a human’s natural habitat — and humans, despite our best individualistic propaganda, are not solitary animals. We are relational creatures who evolved in groups, raised in groups, and find meaning in groups. Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise — and lord knows the twenty-first century is trying — we are not islands.

Therefore an instinct exercised autonomously, severed from the relational context in which it was meant to operate, is structurally incapable of producing genuine satisfaction. Not “less satisfaction.” No satisfaction. The well is real, the bucket is real, but the bucket is full of holes. Pull it up as fast as you like; it will be empty by the time it reaches you.

The medieval mind expressed this with a sentence that has lost none of its sting:

Quaerite autem primum regnum et iustitiam eius, et omnia haec adicientur vobis. “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you.” (Matthew 6:33)

The grammar is doing serious work. The implication is not that if you seek other things you’ll get a slightly worse deal. The implication is that if you seek other things first, you will fail to experience provision at all. The system requires a particular ordering. Try to reverse the order and the whole apparatus seizes up like a transmission with no oil.

So the individual living as an island must, by the logic of his situation, find artificial means to satisfy natural desires. He becomes a hydraulic engineer constructing ever more elaborate pipelines to deliver water that was always going to leak. And the more he engineers, the more his volition is conscripted into the engineering project, until he can no longer remember why he started building in the first place.

Where Addiction Is Born

Herein volition is broken — not by some sudden assault but by a thousand small re-routings, each one reasonable in the moment.

Herein addiction is born — not as a moral failure or a brain disease, but as both, and as something larger than either: a posture toward existence that has been quietly mistaken for existence itself.

The motivational/volitional debate, viewed from this angle, looks less like a genuine controversy and more like two parallel descriptions of the same disaster. Of course the addict is motivated; the motivation is the engine. Of course the addict has lost volition; the steering has been disconnected. But neither description, on its own, explains why a creature would build itself such a machine in the first place. For that, you have to talk about pride. For that, you have to talk about loneliness. For that, you have to talk — uncomfortably, perhaps — about what humans are for.

And that, I suspect, is why the dichotomy persists. Not because it’s intellectually compelling, but because the alternative — that addiction is at root a relational and spiritual disorder dressed up in neurochemistry — is the kind of thing that doesn’t survive peer review, doesn’t fit on a billboard, and won’t be solved by any pill that has yet been invented.

Although, in fairness, we keep trying.

Works Cited

Amen, Daniel G. Change Your Brain, Change Your Life: The Breakthrough Programme for Conquering Anxiety, Depression, Anger and Obsessiveness. Piatkus, 2016.

Baumeister, Roy F., and Amber Cazzell Nadal. “Addiction: Motivation, Action Control, and Habits of Pleasure.” Motivation Science, vol. 3, no. 3, Sept. 2017, pp. 179–195.

Carnes, Patrick. A Gentle Path through the Twelve Steps: The Classic Guide for All People in the Process of Recovery. Hazelden, 2012.

Peeke, Pamela. “Epigenetic Transformation — You Are What Your Grandparents Ate.” TEDxLowerEastSide, 2014.

Sexaholics Anonymous. The White Book. Sexaholics Anonymous, 2001.