Distributed Causality Is as Strong as a Tumor

The easy exculpatory cases (a brain liquefied by 10,000 grenade blasts, a tumor on the amygdala) feel like a single sledgehammer of obvious causation, but for ordinary people behavior is the product of a gazillion microscopic spider-web threads of distributed, statistical causality; the counterintuitive but crucial point is that those threads together form just as strong a causal arrow as the obvious cases—it is merely harder to see.