Not all addicts are the same

The argument

This argument holds that the question 'can you trust a recovered drug addict?' has no single answer because it has no single subject: not all addicts are the same, and trust must therefore be judged person by person rather than granted or withheld from a category. The variation among people who have experienced addiction is enormous on every dimension that bears on trustworthiness. Addictions differ in substance, severity and duration; people arrive at them by different routes — chronic pain, trauma, mental illness, experimentation, environment — and behave differently within them. Recoveries differ just as much: one person has white-knuckled three months, another has a decade of sobriety, therapy, amends made and a life rebuilt. And beneath both runs the most basic source of difference — character. People were honest or dishonest, reliable or feckless, before addiction touched them, and recovery returns them to different baselines. The lying and manipulation associated with active addiction are symptoms of a hijacked brain, not a permanent identity, and how completely they fall away varies with the person and the quality of the recovery. Given that variation, proponents argue, treating 'recovered addicts' as a single class commits a plain logical error: the faulty generalisation, judging an individual by the worst members of a group. No one would accept 'can you trust a divorced person?' as answerable in the aggregate. The rational and fair approach is the one used for everyone else — observe the individual's conduct, weigh their track record and the depth of their recovery, and extend trust accordingly. From this standpoint, the category answers nothing; the person answers everything. Because not all addicts are the same, this argument holds, whether you can trust a recovered drug addict depends on the individual.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The observation is true and answers a different question. Every human category contains enormous variation, so 'it depends on the individual' is available as a response to any question of the form 'can you trust an X' — which makes it a general move about categories rather than a finding about recovery from addiction. If it settles this question, it settles all of them, and none of them was worth asking. Read charitably, the question is whether recovery from addiction is a relevant consideration when extending trust: whether relapse risk, the behavioural patterns of active addiction, and the depth and duration of a recovery are things a reasonable person should weigh. The argument answers yes while appearing to answer no. Its own advice is to weigh 'the depth of their recovery' — which is a category-level consideration applied to a person, and precisely the kind of reasoning it says should be set aside. The divorce comparison is not parallel. Divorce carries no documented pattern of deception towards the people closest to the divorced person, whereas the argument itself concedes that active addiction does. That concession is what gives the question its point, and an analogy that drops it is answering something easier. There is also a practical gap. Individual conduct and track record are often unavailable — a new colleague, a prospective tenant, someone met recently — which is exactly the circumstance in which the question gets asked. The argument offers no guidance for it, while insurers, clinicians and employers in safety-critical roles all use group-level information for precisely that reason, not because they are committing a fallacy but because individual information is costly and incomplete. Finally, the claim that character precedes addiction and recovery returns people to different baselines is a stronger thesis than the position it supports: it says addiction is not the relevant variable at all.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Variation within a category is universal, so this observation is available against any question of the form 'can you trust an X'; it is a general point about categories rather than a finding about recovery from addiction. [Rejecting P2] The premise concedes what the question is asking: advising that trust be weighed against the depth of a person's recovery treats recovery as a relevant consideration, which is the group-level reasoning said to be set aside. The divorce comparison is also not parallel, since divorce carries no documented pattern of deception towards intimates, which the argument grants active addiction does. [Rejecting P3] Individual conduct and track record are frequently unavailable — which is the situation in which the question is actually asked — and no guidance is offered for it, while insurers, clinicians and safety-critical employers use group-level information for exactly that reason.