image shameless stolen from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/towards-a-bayesian-theory-of-willpower
I’m a firm believer that willpower does not exist, or at least in the way that most people think of it without reflection. I don’t find it a terribly helpful way of framing behavior and motivation (Robert Sapolsky knows what’s up). I’m also a believer that Free Will doesn’t exist but that’s a topic for another day. An organism’s intrinsic motivation and willingness to get things done is a complex biophysiologic phenomenon and the commonly understood term willpower is largely not helpful in understanding how and why people get things done(or don’t get them done, as the case may be). This applies when we’re talking about substance use disorders. Everyone’s heard of dopamine and how a drug can hijack what a brain finds salient. Some part of a brain’s survival mechanism has latched on to the drug and wants to pursue it in spite of evidence that it might be detrimental. Where’s the willpower neurotransmitter? We can dissect a person’s behavior in terms of their neurobiology, individual history, social history, genetic history and evolutionary history without finding anything that would correlate to what people would commonly refer to as willpower. Once we have such a mechanism then hopefully we can devise evidence-based interventions that can influence how this person might behave in the future. I’d like to think of this as one version of a restorative justice model. I hope also this explains why retributive Justice isn’t terribly helpful. Retributive Justice is based on a moral model of agency where will, will power, free will, etc, are the main frames for understanding behavior and therefore people deserve any consequences or punishment that they get. Whereas, restorative justice acknowledges factors that may have been outside of an person’s control, as well as factors that can influence this person’s future. And even if you don’t believe me, what if somebody could show some financial incentive to choosing the restorative version rather than the retributed version?