Herbert Fingarette

Philosopher with controversial views on alcoholism

Herbert Fingarette, a contrarian philosopher who, while plumbing the perplexities of personal responsibility, defined heavy drinking as wilful behaviour rather than as a potential disease, died on 2 November at his home in Berkeley, California. He was 97.

Fingarette challenged the theory alcoholism is a progressive disease that can be dealt with only by abstinence, claiming that treatment could include moderate drinking.

Many academics and medical professionals denounced those views as heresy. But they were invoked by the US Supreme Court in the 1988 decision Traynor v. Turnage.

In that ruling, the court affirmed the government’s denial of education benefits to two veterans who had argued that they missed filing deadlines for those benefits because of their addiction as recovering alcoholics. Their claim that alcoholism is a disease beyond a drinker’s control was endorsed by the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association.

But it was rejected by the court, which ruled that certain types of alcohol abuse resulted from deliberate misconduct.

Much of Fingarette’s research and writing concerned accountability. That included what he called the self-deception, validated by science, that alcoholics cannot help themselves.

In Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (1988), he all but accused the treatment industry of conspiring to profit from the conventional theory that alcoholism is a disease. He maintained that heavy use of alcohol is a “way of life,” that many heavy drinkers can choose to reduce their drinking to moderate levels, and that most definitions of the word “alcoholic” are rubbish.

“Some people can drink very heavily and get into no trouble whatsoever,” he told the New York Times in 1989.Fingarette acknowledged that he had not conducted any experimental or clinical studies into alcoholism; he reached his conclusions by analysing scientific literature, he said. But that method, he contended, had given him an advantage over researchers who potentially have a monetary stake in treatment programmes.

During his 40 years teaching philosophy at the University of California, he explored a broad array of subjects, ranging from criminal insanity to Confucius.

Fingarette was born on 20 January 1921, in Brooklyn. He enrolled at the University of California intending to major in chemistry, but most of his experiments were flops. He was drafted into the Army and, after serving during World War II, went back to university. There he was captivated by a Bertrand Russell lecture on David Hume and decided to major in philosophy, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1947 and a doctorate in 1949.

He wed Leslie Josephine Swabacker in 1945. She died in 2011. In addition to their daughter, he is survived by two grandsons.

Fingarette began teaching at Santa Barbara in 1948 and became a professor emeritus in 1988. At his death, he was completing an essay on how the dead continue to shape the lives of the living, a topic he had written about in his book Death: Philosophical Soundings (1996).

“Never in my life will I experience death,” he wrote. “I will never know an end to my life, this life of mine right here on earth.” He added: “People hope never to know the end of consciousness. But why merely hope? It’s a certainty. They never will!”