Addiction Postulates and Legal Causation, or Who’s in Charge,

In this article, I address the persistent confusion over the meaning of a medical diagnosis of drug addiction or substance dependence in the courtroom, specifically in regard to legal judgments about the reasonable legal person, causation, and individual responsibility in civil actions. Using the example of the Engle tobacco litigation in Florida, where the plaintiffs have reduced mind to brain and claimed that the clinical status of addiction excuses or mitigates the smoker’s responsibility for the health consequences of smoking based on brain processes, I examine the conceptual difficulties presented by use of biomedical models of behavior in a legal system predicated on different assumptions altogether. For legal purposes, the biological system in question is the human organism as a whole, not a brain per se, and there is a functional identity between a smoker and his motivational states for purposes of responsibility attribution. J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 41:92–7, 2013 If, in short, there is a [neuronal] community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me.—Jerry Fodor1 A few years ago, historianD.GrahamBurnett2 wrote a fascinating book about a “nineteenth-century New York court case that put the whale on trial and chal-lenged the order of nature. ” It is recommended read-ing for trial lawyers. The case was Maurice v. Judd, which was tried in Manhattan in 1818; the book is Trying Leviathan. The case involved a dispute over a candlemaker’s refusal to pay a $75 fish oil inspection fee on the basis that a whale is not a fish. Like Mel-ville’s Ishmael in Moby-Dick, local whale men took the stand to testify on “the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish. ” There was a titanic clash of scientific experts and leading trial lawyers that transfixed the city for three days. The candle-maker lost. The jury was out all of 15 minutes, re-turning to announce a verdict for the plaintiff, “hav-ing decided that awhale is a fish andwhale oil fish oil” (Ref. 2, p 178). Trying the Leviathan of Addictio