Aquinas on drunkenness and sleep

Aquinas argues that

drunkenness is a mortal sin, because then a man willingly and knowingly deprives himself of the use of reason, whereby he performs virtuous deeds and avoids sin, and thus he sins mortally by running the risk of falling into sin.

On the other hand, Aquinas also argues that sleep suspends the use of reason:

What a man does while asleep, against the moral law, is not imputed to him as a sin; as Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. xii, 15). But this would not be the case if man, while asleep, had free use of his reason and intellect. Therefore the judgment of the intellect is hindered by suspension of the senses.

One might try to reconcile the two claims by saying that sleep is something that befalls us involuntarily, and that it would be wrong to willingly and knowingly go to sleep. But that would not fit with ordinary human practice, and would contradict Aquinas’ own rejection of the claim that it is “against virtue for a person to set himself to sleep”. Moreover, Aquinas notes without any moral warnings that sleep—like baths, contemplation of the truth and other apparently quite innocent things—assuages sorrow.

So what’s going on?

And to add a further complication, Proverbs 31:6 seems to recommend the use of alcohol as an analgesic.

I can think of three things one could say on behalf of Aquinas.

First, one might attempt a Double Effect justification. In sleep, the body rests. Aquinas certainly thinks so: the discussion of the suspension of reason during sleep presupposes that the primary effect of sleep is on the body. It is this bodily rest, rather than the suspension of reason, that is intended. One might worry that the suspension of reason is a means to rest. However, non-human animals, who lack reason in Aquinas’s sense of the word, also sleep. Presumably whatever benefits they derive from the sleep are available to us, and it seems not unlikely that many of these do not depend on the suspension of reason. Similarly, alcohol helps with pain in non-human animals, and so the mechanism by which it helps may not depend on the suspension of reason.

That said, I don’t think Aquinas would want to take this approach (though it may well work for me). For Aquinas thinks that it is stupid we cannot claim that an invariable or typical effect of something intended counts as unintended (Commentary on the Physics, Book II, Lecture 8, paragraph 214). But the suspension of reason is indeed an invariable or typical effect of sleep.

A second approach focuses on Aquinas’ response to the question of why the loss of rationality during the sexual act does not render the sexual act wrong, from which I already quoted the rejection of the claim that it’s vicious to set oneself to sleep:

it is not contrary to virtue, if the act of reason be sometimes interrupted for something that is done in accordance with reason … .

This approach does not seem to be based on Double Effect, but rather on some sort of principle that it is permissible to suspend a good for the sake of that same good. This principle applies neatly to sleep as well as to the biblical case of analgesic use of alcohol (given that reason opposes suffering the pain).

But this approach would also moderate Aquinas’s seemingly absolute rejection of drunkenness. For we can imagine cases where it seems that reason would recommend drunkenness, such as when a tyrant will kill you if you refuse to get drunk with them. And once one allows drunkenness in such extreme cases, what is to prevent allowing it in more moderate cases, such as getting drunk with one’s boss in the hope of getting a deserved promotion… or maybe just for fun? Aquinas can say that these cases are immoral and hence against reason, but that would beg the question.

A third approach would note that sleep, unlike drunken stupor, is a natural human state, and information processing in sleep is itself a part of our human rational processing. However, while this gives a neat explanation of why it’s permissible to set oneself to sleep, it doesn’t explain the permissibility of the analgesic use of alcohol or, more significantly in modern times, of the use of general anaesthesia during medical procedures.

A different approach for justifying sleep, the analgesic use of alcohol and general anaesthesia insists that temporary suspension of a good is different from willful opposition to the good. To eat in an hour rather than now does not oppose the good of food. The down side of this fourth approach is that it seems to destroy Aquinas’s argument against drunkenness as opposed to the good of reason. And it seems to let in too much: can’t one say that by torturing someone, one is merely suspending their painless state?

I think the best philosophical solution is the first, Double Effect. Aquinas alas can’t use it because his version of Double Effect is too narrow, given his view that typical effects of intended things count as intended.

Is it prudent to start drinking alcohol?

Here is an interesing exercise in decision theory.

Suppose (as is basically the case for me, if one doesn’t count chocolates with alcohol or the one or two spoonfuls of wine that my parents gave me as a kid to allay my curiosity) I am a man who never drunk alcohol. Should I?

Well, 6.8% of American males 12 and up suffer from alcoholism. And 83% of American males 12 and up report having drunk alcohol. It follows that the probability of developing alcoholism after drinking is around 8%, whle the probability of developing alcoholism without drinking is around 0%.

Family history might provide one with some reason to think that in one’s own case the statistics on developing would be more pessimistic or more optimistic, but let’s suppose that family history does not provide significant data one way or another.

So, the question is: are the benefits of drinks containing alcohol worth an 8% chance of alcoholism?

Alcoholism is a very serious side-effect. It damages people’s moral lives in significant ways, besides having serious physical health repercussions. The moral damage is actually more worrying to me than the physical health repercussions, both because of the direct harms to self and the indirect harms to others, but the physical health considerations are easier to quantify. Alcoholism reduces life expectancy by about 30%. Thus, developing alcoholism is like getting a 30% chance of instant death at a very young age. Hence, the physical badness of facing an 8% chance of developing alcoholism is like a young child’s facing a 2.4% chance of instant death.

At this point, I think, we can get some intuitions going. Imagine that a parent is trying to decide whether their child should have an operation that has about a 2.4% chance of death. There definitely are cases where it would be reasonable to go for such an operation. But here is one that is not. Suppose that the child has a condition that makes them unable to enjoy any food that has chocolate in it—the chocolate is harmless to them, but it renders the food containing it pleasureless. There is a childhood operation that can treat this condition, but about one in forty children who have the operation die on the operating table. It seems to me clear that parents should refuse this operation and doctors should not offer it, despite the fact that chocolate has great gustatory pleasures associated it. Indeed, I think it is unlikely that the medical profession would approve of the operation.

But I doubt that alcohol’s morally legitimate pleasures exceed those of chocolate.

I said that the moral ills of alcoholism are larger than the physical, but harder to quantify. Still, we can say something. If the physical badness of an 8% chance of alcoholism is like a young child’s facing a 2.4% chance of instant death, and there is a worse moral effect, it follows that the overall badness of an 8% chance of alcoholism is at least as bad as a young child’s facing a 5% chance of instant death. And with a one in twenty chance of death, there are very few operations we would be willing to have performed on a child or ourselves. The operation would have to correct a very dangerous or a seriously debilitating condition. And alcohol does neither.

This suggests to me that if the only information one has is that one is male, the risk of alcoholism is sufficient that the virtue of prudence favors not starting to drink. If one is female, the risk is smaller, but it still seems to me to be sufficiently large for prudence to favor not starting to drink.

There are limitations of the above argument. If one has already started drinking, one may have additional data that goes beyond the base rates of alcoholism—for instance, one may know that in twenty years of drinking, one has not had any serious problems with moderation, in which case the argument does not apply (but of course one might also have data that makes alcoholism a more likely outcome than at the base rate). Similarly, one might have data from family history showing that the danger of alcoholism is smaller than average or from one’s own personal history showing that one lacks the “addictive personality” (but in the latter case, one must beware of self-deceit).

I am a little suspicious of the above arguments because of the Church’s consistent message, clearly tied to Jesus’s own practice, that the drinking of alcohol is intrinsically permissible.

It may be that I am overly cautious in thinking which degree of risk prudence bids us to avoid. Perhaps one thing to say is that while there are serious reasons of prudence not to start drinking, I may be underestimating the weight of the benefits of drinking.

I also think the utilities were different in the past. If spices and chocolate are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, wine might be the main gustatory pleasure available to one, and so the loss of gustatory pleasure would be a more serious loss. Likewise, alcoholic drinks may have health benefits over unsafe drinking water. Finally, even now, one might live in a cultural setting where there are few venues for socialization other than over moderate alcoholic consumption.

Of course, in my own case there are also hedonic reasons not to drink alcoholic drinks: the stuff smells like a disinfectant.