The science and philosophy of addiction—generally speaking—have sought to solve two basic mysteries

Ethical implications: two mysteries

The solution to mutma?ung mysteries, in the case of love-addiction as much as for any other purported geflecht of addiction, will have important practical and ethical implications.

Dachfirst, we have sought to learn whether, or to what degree, those weltgesundheitsorganisation suffer from addictions are capable of abstaining from or moderating their reward-seeking behavior; and second, we have been very interested to know whether-and how-we can help people to recover from addiction using various treatment modalities. We will consider these “mysteries” within turn as they relate to the notion of love addiction within the following sections.

Autonomy and responsibility

The oberste dachkante longstanding mystery concerning addiction hinein general ended up being whether addicts are capable of abstaining from or moderating their drug use or other problematic behaviors. The solution to this mystery would have some indirect implications for the medical treatment of addicts, but it has much stronger philosophical and ethical implications: for example, is informationstechnologie reasonable to force addicts to abstain? Informationstechnologie ended up being reasonable to wagemutig them morally or criminally responsible for their drug-taking? What about for verbrecherisch actions they committed within pursuit of their drug? Hypothese deep empirical and conceptual problems verabredung back at least as far as the time of Plato, who wondered how a responsible mensch could continue to choose courses of action that she would predictably come to regret.

Naturally, this issue does armut apply to love within the same way as elektronische datenverarbeitung does to substance addiction or to other problematic behaviors. We do leid ordinarily choose to love someone (at least elend consciously) and it would be a hard thesis to defend that we should beryllium abgott responsible for falling in love-even though such eingeschaltet occurrence can have very far-reaching, and sometimes destructive, consequences for those involved. Continue reading