Order

In Mary I. Bockover (Ed.), Rules, Rituals and Responsibility: Essays Dedicated to Herbert Fingarette, (La Salle, IL: Open Court) pp. 37-53, 1991

Stanton Peele
Morristown, New Jersey

One would not think of Herb Fingarette as a radical revisionist. A gentlemanly, soft-spoken man, he has spent his years in philosophy contemplating questions of behavior and responsibility, writing for legal and behavioral journals, and participating in learned councils that deliberate on these issues. This was how he became engaged in the most contentious topic in modern social science (excluding, perhaps, racial differences in intelligence): the debate over whether alcoholism is best regarded as a disease.

As a legal/moral philosopher, Herb had long been concerned with issues of criminal responsibility. In his book, Self-Deception, Herb argued that explicit consciousness required a person to spell out the motivations and consequences of his or her actions: the refusal to do so comprised a particular variety of self-deception.¹ One noteworthy consequence of the compromised personal agency brought on by a person's ignoring, and thereby disavowing, personal engagement in his or her actions is to undermine moral and criminal responsibility. If a person is unconscious of how his or her actions lead to harm of others or what brings on this misconduct, then may he or she not be excused for these actions?

An opportunity to explore this model was presented for Herb when the Supreme Court considered the issue of whether alcoholism is a disease and whether being alcoholic excuses one from criminal responsibility.² Although, when entering this fray, Herb's sense was that alcoholism had been established to be a disease, his examination of the issues thoroughly convinced him otherwise. There was no genetic or other biological explanation for why a person drinks too much either on a particular occasion or habitually, why a person commits violent or criminal acts when drunk, why a person decides that he or she is an alcoholic and that drinking is an excuse for misbehavior. Instead, Herb saw, drinking was an all-purpose excuse, a special case of self-deception anointed by science but actually steeped in the lore of magical "loss of control"—"I couldn't help myself"—as though this description of irresponsibility was somehow an explanation and an excuse for it.

Herb's position achieved its greatest notoriety when his work was cited by the Supreme Court in denying two alcoholic veterans VA educational benefits they were unable to use within the period established by VA regulations because, they claimed, they were alcoholics. In other words, they spent so much of this time drinking that they didn't feel like going to school, a situation they claim was brought on by the disease of alcoholism from which they suffered. One irony in this case was that, although the VA's position was that these men engaged in willful misconduct rather than manifesting a disease, the VA treatment creed is very much one based on the disease model. The VA expressed a different, sensible position in this case because to do otherwise would simply overwhelm the federal government with unimaginable claims it owed people who were too drunk to demand them at some time in the past.

As a psychologist, I am interested primarily in the psychological implications of disease views of human behavior, and of the excuse-making and lack of self-awareness they signify. Herb Fingarette has addressed these issues as a philosopher. In his book Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease, Herb makes clear that it is both more accurate and more useful to think of heavy drinking as a "way of life" than as a disease. Herb's great achievement was, with the dispassion of a professional philosopher and the compassion of a concerned human being, to dispose of the fallacy that the only alternative to treating alcoholism medically as a disease is to treat it punitively as a sin or a crime:

There is no reason to see heavy drinking as a symptom of illness, a sign of persistent evil, or the mark of a conscienceless will. Rarely do people choose a destructive or self-destructive way of life. On the contrary, we shape our lives day to day, crisis by crisis.... We each share the propensity to choose opportunistically when under stress. So, on a series of occasions, a drinker chooses what seems the lesser evil, the temporarily easier compromise, without a clear appreciation of the long-run implications.

If our righteous condemnation is not in order, neither is our cooperation in excusing heavy drinkers or helping them evade responsibility for change. Compassion, constructive aid, and the respect manifest in expecting a person to act responsibly—these are usually the reasonable basic attitudes to take when confronting a particular heavy drinker who is in trouble . . . . ³

Herb makes clear that the disease model, by dismissing the heavy drinker's responsibility for his or her excesses, also denies the drinker's responsibility to change his or her way of life in ways that matter:

Instead of encouraging those concerned to see the drinking in the context of the person's way of life, and thus to discern what role or roles it may play for that person in coping with life, the logic of the disease concept does the contrary. It leads all concerned, including the drinker, to deny, to ignore, to discount what meaning that way of life may have. Seen as an involuntary symptom of a disease, the drinking is isolated from the rest of life, and viewed as the meaningless but destructive effect of a noxious condition, a "disease."⁴

He then asks a key question:

But what if this is totally wrong? What if that life reflects, perhaps unwisely and obscurely, the drinker's attempts to cope with feelings, emotions, attitudes, relationships that are not acceptable to others—perhaps not fully acceptable even to the drinker—but that are, for better or worse, those that surge up in the drinker's soul?⁵

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