[Gormo]

> Individual behavior doesn't really exist, you don't have choices outside the ones provided by society.

No, that's quite backwards. Individual behavior is effectively the only thing that objectively exists, as "society" is just an emergent pattern of aggregated individual behavior. Individuals' choices are limited by their own particular capacities, and "society" factors into that only in the sense that the choices of other individuals in the same bounded context, in aggregate, can function as environmental constraints. So a more accurate statement is "every individual has full freedom of choice, but external constraints including the behavior of others may limit one's ability to fully execute the choices one has made".

Given that the act of smoking entails deliberately choosing to purchase a product, light it on fire, and actively inhale the fumes -- all behaviors which are necessarily the result of purposeful intention -- and given that within any social context one will find some people who smoke but a great many who do not, along with many who have chosen to quit (despite the external influences and incentives being largely constant), it seems impossible to attribute smoking to anything other than conscious individual choice.

I once asked family member why they smoke, and the response was "because I love it". I had, and could have, no retort to that -- if another person consciously chooses to make the risk/reward tradeoff in favor of short-term pleasure rather than longer-term health, then there's no further argument to be had, and the only demand that any other party could make is that they not be exposed to negative externalities resulting from that choice.