Struggling to change is different from not wanting to change. People seem to have trouble with basic distinctions like this when they're heavy into moralizing failure to change.
Profound point. My mother struggled with alcoholism and ultimately succumbed to that disease. In philosophy of mind they use “akrasia” and “akratic thinking” for acting against ones better judgement. It helped me somewhat getting to understand what my mother was going through at that time.
She wanted to change, tried a many multiple of times and it failed. Fault, guilt, blame are useless concepts to use on the Other. And only in moderation should they be applied to the Self. There deep disconnects between what we think, know and do.
I find it helps to explicitly abandon the expectation that each person has a unitary and consistent will.
Bob the gambler wants to quit and wants to wager, sometimes sequentially and sometimes simultaneously.
The question isn't whether the whole Bob "means it", but which version of Bob we want to ally-with to war against the other, and what conditions or limitations we put on that assistance.
Reading this thread it seems like you're the only one moralizing and looking down on people. I don't see anyone here shaming people for their choices. But somehow you seem to have read the worst interpretation of every reply.
Drugs expand what helping yourself means to the point where people will actually do so.
Statins, GLP-1 antagonists, etc isn’t magic, but it changes people’s behavior and bodies in such as way as to diminish the importance of willpower. Thus, it’s not that people are lacking instead our medicine is simply to primitive to help with a wide range of issues.
Or, as we're becoming aware with GLP-1 drugs, an injection. (For now!). It's better to help people behave better with drugs than moral condemnation. Almost infinitely better, as it turns out, regarding a lot of problematic behavior regarded as "untreatable" previously.
