Addictions, Diseases and Responsibilities

Those of you who are sports fans, particularly New York sports fans, may know of Steve Phillips, the former Mets general manager turned ESPN baseball analyst, whose lurid tales of womanizing have become fodder beyond the sports page. Most recently, the 46-year old married father of four sons had an affair with a 22-year old ESPN staffer, leading to the dismissal of both Phillips and the staffer. Phillips subsequently checked himself into the same behavioral rehabilitation clinic where Tiger Woods is getting treatment.

Phillips is currently out of rehab and speaking out, and I have to confess that on the surface, I'm still a little confused by his words. On one hand, Phillips acknowledges, "I’m fully responsible for everything that I did and accept responsibility for that." Good. But on the other hand, he explains and counts himself as someone who has a sex addiction, hence the treatment and rehab.

Here's where I'm confused, and it's not just with Phillips' case. Let's define addiction:

ad dic tion [uh-dik-shuhn]

–noun

the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.

Okay, so we've established that addiction is "being enslaved", which implies powerlessness or compulsion. Hence, from a moral sense, there's an belief that the afflicted can be viewed as an innocent victim as opposed to a transgressor. There's a sense that a person is somehow predisposed, either psychologically or physiologically, to behave in a certain way without the ability to control the behavior.

This leads to the thought that addiction is very much a disease, and should be treated in a "no fault" sympathy-deserving patient angle in the same way that you'd approach someone stricken with cancer. Clearly only the most callous individual would assess moral blame on someone who was stricken with disease, though this might become murkier if the afflicted suffered from heart disease and made Long John Silver's, KFC, and BK breakfast sandwiches a daily tradition.

So where does moral responsibility lie with those who live with addictions? Does the predisposition to harmful behavior which hurts self or others absolve a person from blame? I don't think so, which is why I largely reject the notion that addiction is guilt-free (and maybe this is where Steve Phillips and I may actually agree).

Part of it is my doctrinal and theological understanding of the sinful nature of man. All of us are predisposed to morally fall short, even though the depths and manifestation of those moral failures may look very different from person to person. But at some level, we choose to give in to these predispositions, whether it's the first snort of cocaine, the first illicit sexual liaison, or the first lie that embellishes our value at work. When we fall into a pattern which escalates in this area, we may need a increasing or yet another "hit" to get the satisfaction that we felt earlier. In that sense, we're hooked. But does that absolve us from moral responsibility? Hardly.

Regardless, I wish Steve Phillips well on his road to recovery and reconciliation with his family. Mets fans ought to, as well, regardless of some awful bonehead moves (acquiring Mo Vaughn, Jeromy Burnitz and Kevin Appier way after their prime, trading away Jason Isringhausen, etc.)