Artículos en desarrollo
Not in control but still responsible: lay perceptions of control and moral responsibility in the context of addiction (en colaboración con Gino Marttelo Carmona Díaz y Mafe Rangel).
Since people with addiction seem not to satisfy the control condition for moral responsibility, or to do so imperfectly, it has been argued that they should be considered less than fully responsible for moral harms that are secondary to decisions to use drugs. We conducted two experimental studies (Study 1, N=330; Study 2, N=413) recruiting non-expert participants to investigate whether the lay view of moral responsibility in the context of addiction endorses the control excuse. We found that laypeople tend to think of addiction as a condition that impairs behavioral control, but that they do not see people with addiction as less responsible for harmful consequences of their drug use. Interestingly, participants responded differently to an analogous scenario involving OCD. People with OCD were also seen as having limited control, but they were seen as significantly less responsible than people with addiction for harmful consequences of their behavior. Our studies provide evidence that a key difference between OCD and addiction in laypeople’s view is that they tend to see people with addiction as responsible for having the condition. A striking fact about our findings is that participants considered our characters responsible for their addiction even when it would seem reasonable to expect otherwise. We speculate that this may reflect a strong prejudice against people with addiction, consistent with previous research on the stigma of addiction. We conclude by discussing how this might be used by proponents of the normative adequacy of the control excuse by providing an error theory for the lay view.
¿Es el miedo filogenéticamente antiguo? (en colaboración con Andrea Melamed)
De acuerdo con un punto de vista popular en filosofía de las emociones, cuando respondemos a un evento o situación con miedo, ira o alegría estamos instanciando un patrón de respuesta que estaba disponible para nuestros antepasados evolutivos hace millones de años. La viabilidad de este punto de vista ha sido en ocasiones puesta en duda señalando que parece ser incompatible con diferentes consideraciones que subrayan las diferencias significativas entre el modo en que los seres humanos experimentamos típicamente episodios de estas emociones y las características de los episodios que atribuimos a otras especies. ¿Cómo es posible que sea filogenéticamente antiguo algo que involucra habilidades de adquisición reciente en términos filogenéticos? En este artículo, analizamos este problema y discutimos las principales opciones teóricas para su resolución. Aunque no defendemos ninguna de estas soluciones en particular, subrayamos el modo en que todas ellas conducen de diferentes modos a adoptar una posición revisionista frente a las categorías ordinarias de emoción. Nuestro argumento muestra que tenemos buenos motivos para pensar que el revisionismo ha de ser parte de la solución al problema, más allá de cómo se resuelvan las disputas ulteriores entre las diferentes opciones en pugna.
Addiction, Attention, and the Weight of Reasons
A striking feature of addiction is that people who suffer from it often choose to use drugs despite being aware of powerful reasons not to. This behavior is so puzzling that many have concluded that drug use in addiction is not really the result of choice at all, but the product of drive states that overwhelm or bypass agents' capacity to choose. There is, however, ample evidence that ordinary instances of addictive behavior are by and large driven by choices. In the words of Richard Holton (2009, p. 103), addiction typically works through, rather than against, our intentional systems. The main challenge for theories of addiction is to understand how the reduction in reasons-responsiveness results from the way in which the mechanisms involved in making choices operate, rather than to explain how the capacity to make choices is bypassed or overwhelmed. In this paper, I present a view of decision-making in addiction as influenced by relatively tenuous but persistent attentional biases. My focus is on instances of practical deliberation, as extended sequences of mental actions in which an agent thinks about what to do and weighs considerations for and against a given course of action. The hypothesis I put forward is that when people with addiction ponder whether to use drugs in a particular situation, considerations favoring drug use tend to be preferentially retrieved from memory and be preferentially elaborated once recalled. Both features of the deliberation process reflect the operation of persistent attentional biases. The tendency for use-favoring considerations to win out the retrieval competition and be sustained in working memory explains why particular instances of deliberation about whether to use drugs are sometimes less responsive to reasons against using than expected: considerations that are not attended to are deliberatively inert. People with addiction sometimes choose in ways that do not reflect their knowledge of what reasons there are, not because they have changed their minds but because the relevant reasons may drop out of sight at critical junctures. I call this the attentional capture model.
Addiction ain’t (just) in the head
In this paper, I argue that the internalistic account of dysfunction in the context of addiction fails. I present three arguments against the internalistic account, and I conclude that the most plausible candidate for a dysfunction in addiction involves dysfunctional ways of interacting with a certain range of environmental conditions. If we want to pursue the idea that there is, in fact, a dysfunction in the context of addiction, we need to go externalistic. This poses a challenge for those inclined to endorse the conjunction between the dysfunction-based disorder claim and psychiatric internalism: if my argument is correct, they should abandon at least one of these views.
Un artículo sobre la autoría del discurso producido con asistencia de interfaces neuroprostéticas (con Jorge Fuentes y Abel Wajnerman).
Un capítulo sobre autonomía en la toma de decisiones médicas en casos de adicción.
Una reseña de What is it like to be an addict?, de Owen Flanagan.
Un estudio experimental sobre la relación entre estigmatización y atribución de responsabilidad en casos de adicción (con Gino Carmona Díaz y Mafe Rangel).
Un artículo sobre sesgos implícitos en percepción visual y responsabilidad moral (con Juan R. Loaiza y Francisco Pereira).
Un artículo sobre motivación y emociones para la enciclopedia de la Sociedad Española de Filosofía Analítica (con Juan R. Loaiza).