Although materialism underlies natural science and natural science has provided explanations of the elements and forces of the universe which have proven to have unprecedented predictive power, both have struggled to account for individual agency. Materialists have typically appealed to mechanical explanations at odds with the moral view of individuals according to which they are ultimately responsible for their actions. If humans are built from the same elements as the rest of the natural world and obey they same causal principles, then there should not be anything metaphysically unique about us such that we have the power to step outside those causal forces and initiate actions on the basis of nothing more than our choices. “Free will” appears to be either an echo of a distant religious problem– how to reconcile human sin with divine omnipotence and omniscience– or a black box which science is forbidden from looking into for fear that there will prove nothing inside. Unfortunately, the more we learn about cognition and decision-making the less classical doctrines of free will are compatible with scientific materialism.

And yet, the belief that we are not simply behaviour machines but capable of initiating actions that would not have been initiated unless persons chose them persists. But this belief persists not simply as an echo of older religious principles or empty appeals to an inexplicable power (free will) but because it has roots in our own experience and seems necessary to explain– and judge– social behaviour. We know that we have instincts like other animals: when we are frightened we jump, become more intensely aware of our surroundings, and coil ourselves to fight or flee. These reactions contrast with our capacity to deliberate, weigh options, and choose– seemingly without compelling external pressure– between one course of action and its opposite. It was this capacity to choose between opposites that Aristotle appealed to in his critique of the Greek atomists’ account of the soul. Democritus argued that the soul was nothing more than the power of living bodies to move. He explained its motive power as a function of the shape of the atoms that composed the soul. They were comparatively smooth and could roll around within the body, causing it to move in outwardly observable ways. Aristotle argued that this explanation was incoherent because Democritus appealed to same mechanical force to explain opposite actions without explaining how the soul atoms rolled one way when the person moved and stopped rolling when the person stopped moving. If rolling atoms explain both motion and rest we are still owed an explanation of what causes the atoms to roll or not roll: we still need an explanation of agency, the power of choice. Thus, even if there are mechanical elements of human choice, agency cannot be reduced to those elements.

Our own experience suggests that Aristotle had a point. But the entire history of scientific analysis of human action suggests also that Aristotle– and, indeed all doctrines of free will- simply help themselves to an idea of agency, free will, call it what one will– that is radically at odds with everything else we have learned about the physical reality of which we are but a part. On the one hand, these arguments pro and contra human agential distinctiveness have gone back and forth in a mostly sterile metaphysical debate for centuries. But underlying the metaphysical debate between defenders of free will and determinists lies a set of socially essential practical problems. On the one hand, the legitimacy of law and morality as such both presuppose that human beings can legitimately be held accountable for their actions. On the other hand, many political struggles are justified on the grounds that the group is fighting for self-determination, which would be nonsense if what they are really doing is enacting a script written in the language of mechanical forces. Even more basically, our individual sense of self-esteem or self-respect is bound up with our willingness to take responsibility for our actions. Cowards appeal to circumstances to explain the actions that they performed which harmed other people. But the coward is ashamed of their cowardice. People who respect themselves, and thus earn the respect of others take responsibility for their actions.

Is responsibility nothing more than a way of talking about actions which, if we looked closely enough, would turn out to be functions of mechanical causal rules? Do we have a “two tables” problem (Sir Arthur Edington gave the example of the table as known by quantum mechanics, which is mostly empty space, and the table that we rest our coffee cup on to illustrate the vast difference between ordinary experience and the scientific picture of the world). Is free will a matter of perspective? When we examine ourselves from the third person perspective we are objects like every other object, but when we think of ourselves from the first person perspective we appear as self-determining subjects. Or does something novel emerge into the universe when a hundred billions of brain cells are interlinked and combined with the powers to make articulate sounds and grasp and hold objects? I would defend the later view, but must also admit that the precise process by which consciousness and intentionality have emerged from the interactions between elements that are not conscious or intentional remains an open question.

While the scientific explanation of the emergence of consciousness remains an open question, the problem of responsibility cannot await a final consensus on how consciousness and self-consciousness emerged from more basic material elements. Since social relationships are mediated by legal and moral principles, and legal and moral principles presuppose that selves are, to some degree at least, responsible for their actions, if it should turn out that human beings are just functions of circumstances and mechanical forces then the legitimacy of law and morality (not this or that law or moral principle, but law and morality as such) would collapse and human society would have to be re-interpreted as a complex beehive and not a voluntary association between equals. Hierarchies would be naturalized and the idea that we can consciously steer human relations towards more perfect forms would have to be dropped as an illusion.

But if we are in some sense responsible for the worlds we live in and the lives we lead it is difficult to draw the line at exactly where the force of circumstances ends our own own agential powers begin. Let us take two examples, much in the news everywhere- homelessness and public addiction to potentially fatal drugs. The right wing tends to isolate the self from the circumstances and blame the addict or homeless person. Their being homeless and or addicted is explained as a function of a weak character, but where this character came from is not explained. If people were just born with a fixed character then they would not be responsible for it (and therefore they could not coherently be blamed for being homeless or addicted to deadly drugs). If, on the other hand, character is formed, then differences of character would have to be explained historically, taking into account the different circumstances that different people experienced. In that case too one’s character cannot be accounted for by appeal only to inward factors, complicating the process of blame attribution.

The left is likely to adopt a version of the later approach, seeing character as an historical artefact of circumstances. In this version people are functions of circumstances. What appear to the right as moral failings of character are in reality social failings of institutions. Wage rates and rents are set by market conditions: If some workers cannot afford housing that is not their fault but the result of unregulated market forces. People who become addicted to life-destructive drugs typically have not decided, arbitrarily, to become addicts; they have fallen into addiction, often as a response to a trauma they did not choose to undergo. Their psyche becomes overloaded, so to speak, and they mechanically seek relief in the initially soothing but soon life-threatening narcotic drug. Whereas the right preaches punishment, the left preaches social reform, but both seem to sidestep the difficult question of where individual responsibility begins. This is no abstract metaphysical problem: it has decisive political implications.

One of the main drivers of right wing populist power is a rhetorically effective construction of the left as molly-coddlers who refuse to hold people responsible for their bad choices and who throw good money after bad on social programs that do not work but rob hard working tax payers of their income. Case in point: the debate in Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, about whether to build a barrier wall separating a safe injection site from city hall. Addicts regularly harass workers coming and going from their workplace, but rather than focus on the threat that the workers are facing and take measures to insist that the cause of the problem– the addicts’ behaviour– stop or impose costs on them, as would be the case with other citizens indulging in criminal harassment– the mayor is worried about public perceptions that the wall will reinforce the “social exclusion,” of the addicts. But the addicts are already socially excluded by their addiction. The mayor’s handwringing sounds compassionate but ignores rather than addresses the roots of the problem and leaves everyone, workers and addicts alike, to suffer the consequences of addiction.

Absurd arguments like those made by the mayor of Nanaimo are repeated daily across North America. They provide ammunition for the right wing argument that the only way to deal with city centres filled with barely conscious addicts and homeless encampments is to clean up the streets and force addicts into treatment or put them in prison. The left does not help itself when it responds with euphemism (unhoused rather than homeless, victim of substance abuse disorder rather than addict) which do not address the underlying material reality that everyone can see and many feel threatened by. Nor does it help itself when it refuses to engage the question of individual responsibility at all. Like the terms freedom, liberty, and free speech, the left should not let the right appropriate the value of individual responsibility. If it continues along its current philosophical path the left will have no political values left on which to stand but only saccharine platitudes like “inclusion.” Properly understood, individual responsibility is essential to the human dignity that supporters of homeless and addicted people want to defend.

Respect for people’s dignity does not mean affirming every choice they make or arguing that social resources should be expended to solve social problems no strings attached, without without any demands being placed on the recipients. Provision of resources without any present or future demand that the beneficiary contribute to the production of the wealth from which those resources are drawn is the way we treat pets, not human beings. Social problems are problems because they are conditions of life which need to be changed and improved. If addiction is a social problem, then addiction is not a fulfilling form of life but a prison from which the addict must escape. The issue is not drug use per se, it is life-destroying dependence on a substance that gives nothing of life-value and robs the person of all capacity for resonant experience and creative activity. The problem is therefore not addressed by allowing addicts to persist in their addiction, whether through safe injection sites or supplying clean drugs at tax payers expense. The problem can only be solved by creating support networks in which addicts re-discover the inner strength necessary to change themselves and free themselves from their addiction.

Well meaning people who argue that addicts are ill and need drugs as medicine forget that public health care is paid for by tax dollars, which are ultimately generated by economic activity, which is ultimately a function of human labour. The left forgets the labour theory of value at its peril. All taxes are ultimately taxes on wealth produced by human labour. There is only wealth to tax because workers produce that value. This is why labour is both an obligation and a social necessity. Marx did not make contribution the first principle of distribution in a socialist society arbitrarily. If no one works there would be no food, no buildings, no doctors or nurses, and no money-value to re-distribute through taxation. No group of people can be freed permanently from the obligation to contribute to the production of social wealth and still demand to be recognized as equal citizens.

Here the disabled rights movement can be most instructive. One of its major demands was that disabled people be recognized as capable contributors to the production of social wealth. Against pitying mis-representation of their disabilities as barriers to employment they demonstrated that the main barriers lay in medicalized constructions of disability, unfounded assumptions about what they were capable of, and barriers in the built environment. They did not demand to be kept fed and housed in medical institutions; they demanded the freedom to work and become independent citizens and subjects of their own life. Their human dignity was expressed as a movement for “independent living.” The addiction crisis should be approached with this example in mind.

No one is responsible for every event that befalls them in life. Many of those deepest in the pit of addiction were abused and suffered other traumas. Responsibility does not mean accepting blame for one’s condition. The opposite is the case: assuming responsibility for one’s life means deciding that, despite the injustices to which one has been subjected, injustices for which one is not to blame, one is going to assume responsibility for one’s future: to act differently rather than persist in life-destructive patterns imposed by the past. No one can do that on their own. Individuals are social beings and individual responsibility is a social achievement. Investing social wealth in making public spaces and workplaces accessible has enabled the disabled to free themselves from medical institutions and live as independent, contributing citizens. Social wealth needs to be invested in structured spaces where addicts can form their own communities, perhaps led initially by former addicts who have the experiential knowledge necessary to provide effective support as people struggle to free themselves from total dependence on life-destructive drugs. Instead of the threat of jail, the promise of housing and increased levels of monetary support can induce addicts living on the street to accept the offer of help. But there has to be demands placed on the person. The supportive housing could be governed by a constitution that the residents help write and must abide by. Human dignity means being an object of respect, but we challenge those that we respect to confront hurdles and accept some personal pain for the sake of growth. That is, once again, the difference between treating someone as a human being and treating someone as a pet.

To confine the discussion around addiction to safe injection sites and tax-payer funded safe supply of drugs is politically dangerous. Working people do not want their communities overrun by addicts (there is never any question of siting injection sites or allowing homeless encampments in rich neighborhoods). They will continue to vote in significant numbers for right wing candidates if they are the only one’s to acknowledge the reality that an addiction crisis is not solved by creating conditions for addicts to remain addicted to drugs that everyone knows- and especially the addicts- destroy every human cognitive and creative capacity. But the deeper problem is that this well-intentioned response fails to respect the humanity of the people it is supposed to recognize. It treats them as so weak and fragile that they cannot be challenged to take a sober look at themselves and decide that they need to change. Compassion is not always life-enabling. Love is, but love can be tough. It is not freely given but makes demands on the object. If we love our neighbour– and we should– then we sometimes have to point out that they are destroying themselves and we won’t fund that project.

A kick in the arse is not always the worst thing that someone can receive.

The brutal facts of the matter are that long-term addictions to opioids– as to alcohol or tobacco– are eventually destructive of life on all levels, whether the supply of drugs is safe or not. People react to overdose spikes and argue that the solution is safe injection sites and safe supply of drugs. But those responses are by definition not responses to the real crisis: the addiction that impedes the person’s ability to do anything other than feed the addiction. Respect for addicts as human beings must take the form of investing in transitional institutions that will allow them to free themselves from the addiction, not enabling stop gaps that keep the person addicted and thus contribute to (most likely) shortening their life and (certainly) ensuring that their life is devoid of the experiences, activities, and relationships that make it enjoyable and worthwhile.

The left cannot wait for the revolution to solve immediate social problems. Arguing that there will be no addiction crisis under socialism, no crime, hatred, or violence simply assumes away the causes of present problems without in any way addressing them. Social problems affect real people right now. They must be addressed right now. Ideas about abstract alternatives are not concrete responses to actually existing suffering. But actually existing suffering also cannot be solved simply by compassionate feelings towards the sufferers or worrying about making them feel excluded. They exclude themselves by submerging themselves in the fog of opiod nods. Their humanity demands that they be challenged to change, assuming that the social investments have been made in the resources they will need to overcome their addiction.

In a stable communist society Marx argued that labour would cease to appear as an imposed burden. Instead, people would want to work to contribute to the common wealth as their “prime want.” But I think people can– and must- want to contribute to whatever society they happen to live in, while also addressing any structural impediments that alienate labour and turn it into an imposed routine. We cannot conclude that because labour is not completely free under capitalism everyone is free of the obligation to work until such time as its depth structures of alienation and exploitation are overcome. But if there is an obligation to work, it must fall, in principle, equally on everyone. But that obligation is not a bad thing. People love life when they find it meaningful and we fond it meaningful when we have things to do that are valuable and valued by others. Work remains an important means of contributing goods of value to others and therefore an important way of being valued by our fellow citizens.

Dignified beings do not want charity, do not want to be objects of pity, do not want to be objects of anything, but be what they are– subjects of their own life history. But being a subject comes with responsibilities too. As Andre Gorz once argued in his excellent but neglected Critique of Economic Reason, making contributions through labour is the necessary condition of having social rights. “It is through these rights– and thererfore through the duties they give me– that [we] recognize [each other as citizens]. In so far as I belong to society it has the right to ask me to do my appropriate share of social labour” (207). His point is not that the state has the power to impose the burden of labour as a condition of access to goods, but rather that people who understand what it means to be a member of a society willingly accept the duty to labour as an inner need to contribute to the production of the goods each of their fellow citizens lives require. The principle of willing contribution to the collective good must be the starting point of tackling pervasive problems like addiction and homelessness.