There is no hidden \u201cagent\u201d inside us that can combat the predispositions jointly produced by our genes and environment \u2014 because that\u2019s all we are. And this fact has stark implications for how we treat other people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Free will is one of the oldest topics in philosophy. It seems to tap into a fundamental intuition that we have about the way we navigate the world, and that intuition has been hard to overturn. The broadest concept of free will \u2014 the belief that humans are uncaused causers, autonomous and fully morally responsible \u2014 is a philosophical position called libertarianism<\/em>. And while it is not prima facie<\/em> at odds with our modern scientific understanding of the world, it is certainly in tension with it. In defiance of our intuitions, many advances in science and philosophy have seemed to gradually chip away at the possibility of true free will in this broad sense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Many past concepts of free will have been grounded in the assumption that we were created by an all-powerful deity, which granted freedom of the will to us in some metaphysically unique way. By contrast, the modern scientific method usually takes the assumption of physicalism<\/em> \u2014 the belief that only the physical exists, implying that there is no \u201csoul\u201d or anything like it. And in place of the idea that humans have a unique metaphysical claim to libertarian free will, the Darwinian revolution has humbled the human race by identifying us as simply one species in a vast, branching lineage of organisms, all of which developed from a previous stage in the same lineage according to natural selection and other evolutionary forces. In other words, science has revealed that there is no dividing line that separates humans from other animals; that we evolved by the same processes and from the same materials as other organisms; and that this entire evolutionary process \u2014 and our minds, by extension \u2014 consists of nothing but physical components.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n In spite of these discoveries and advancements, many secular philosophers have continued to develop new arguments to revive the concept of free will in a physicalist context. John Lemos (2002), for example, attempts to integrate libertarianism and Darwinian naturalism. But in the course of his arguments, he reveals a common fallacy in the framing of physicalist forms of free will.<\/p>\n\n\n\t\n\t The libertarian can even concede that genetic and environmental factors incline a person to act one way or the other in the face of [alternative courses of action]. But what the libertarian will not concede is that all human decisions among such alternatives are ultimately controlled entirely by genetic and environmental factors. While our genetics and environment might incline<\/i> us a certain way, they cannot be completely determinative<\/i> of our actions when we are acting autonomously<\/strong>\u2026 [M]uch of the evidence we have for the truth of the libertarian position appeals to our own subjective awareness of moral struggles against inclinations that we have acquired due to genetic and environmental factors.<\/p>\n\t(Lemos, 2002, p. 475, bold added)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\t\n\n\n It is not inherently fallacious to talk about internal struggles: in many situations, agents are pulled in different directions by multiple motives. But it is another thing entirely to attribute different motivations to genetic and environmental causes, and other motives to\u2026 well, what? As it turns out, if you don\u2019t believe in anything like a soul, describing a human agent as struggling \u201cagainst inclinations [acquired] due to genetic and environmental factors\u201d is virtually incoherent. To see why this is the case, we need only examine a very brief sketch of the early stages of developmental biology and the process of genetic expression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Assuming that humans are purely physical products of evolution by natural selection, a human zygote is little more than a bundle of genes in an admittedly complex protective enclosure. But the boundary between \u201cgenes\u201d and \u201cenvironment\u201d is not<\/em> the cell itself; nor is the membrane of the nucleus. Strictly speaking, everything that is not<\/em> a particular gene would be considered part of that gene\u2019s environment<\/b>, including other genes in the same genome (Dawkins, 1982). And a gene cannot produce phenotypes in a vacuum: it relies on the enzymes, proteins, other genes, and epigenetic markers in its environment to generate anything in the first place. Thus, genes can only produce phenotypic effects through the medium of their environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moreover, the direct effects of genes are extremely limited: \u201call genetic effects are \u2018byproducts\u2019 except protein molecules\u201d (Dawkins, 1987, p. 300). And those proteins, along with all their downstream phenotypic products, become part of the gene\u2019s environment in turn. As the organism develops, cells will continue to divide and genes will be expressed in increasingly complex and location-specific ways. In animals like us, this will eventually produce sense organs and neurons, which will ultimately result in cognition and behavior. So, at what point in this process did something other than genes and their environment come into play? No matter how complex, every phenotypic effect is ultimately traceable to some combination of genetic and environmental factors. In a purely physical world, when it comes to the behavior of organisms, the combined contributions of genes and environments are exhaustive<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n One could argue that the phenotype or organism itself, as an emergent phenomenon, is a distinct agent. However, when you begin to talk in this agential sense \u2014 what Dan Dennett (1995) calls the intentional stance<\/em> \u2014 it no longer makes sense to speak of genetic or environmental contributions to that emergent phenomenon, because those are separate levels of analysis<\/b><\/em>. The genes and environment that contributed to the behavior are better analyzed from what Dennett calls the design stance<\/em>: they concern the way that phenotypes are generated, often with an eye to their original evolutionary \u201cpurpose.\u201d While both stances are cogent and useful, they are ultimately appealing to entirely different forms of explanation: trying to compare them would be committing a category error.<\/a> Humans can be conceived of as whole agents, or<\/u><\/em> they can be conceived of as the product of the interaction between genetic and environmental factors \u2014 but not both at the same time. So if you want to talk about either genetic or environmental contributions to a behavior, there is no third type of causal factor at that level.[i]<\/a><\/sup><\/p> \n\n\n\n To clarify this point, I want to draw a comparison with an idea from Neil Levy\u2019s (2011) Hard Luck<\/em>. In it, he contrasts present luck<\/em> \u2014 what we are usually referring to when we talk about luck \u2014 with constitutive luck<\/em> \u2014 that is, luck in one\u2019s constituent traits and dispositions. He points out that all the constituent traits generating our behavior in the present were originally the result of luck at some earlier point in time.<\/b> Thus, Levy argues that all forms of behavior will ultimately be caught in what he calls \u201cthe luck pincer\u201d: they are either attributable to the luck we experience in the present moment on one side, or our history of accumulated constitutive luck on the other. I will discuss this concept more later, but for now, I only intend to compare the luck pincer with what I\u2019ll call the phenotype pincer<\/em>: just as present luck is converted to constitutive luck, proteins produced by a gene are converted to features of that gene\u2019s environment.<\/b> Thus, all phenotypic effects are ultimately attributable to some combination of the two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n While I doubt most gene\u2019s-eye-view<\/a> genetic and evolutionary scientists would take issue with this point directly, even the most intelligent and educated researchers sometimes discuss the \u201cnature-nurture problem\u201d and related ideas in the same fundamentally misleading terms. Even behavioral geneticist Paige Harden, who dedicated the better part of her recent book to arguing for the relevance of genetic luck, occasionally seems to slip back into this implicit mindset:<\/p>\n\n\n\t\n\t Take the power of the genetic lottery seriously, and you might be faced with the realization that many of the things<\/strong> you pride yourself on, your high vocabulary and your quick processing speed, your orderliness and your \u201cgrit,\u201d the fact that you always did well in school, are the consequence of a series of lucky breaks [both environmental and genetic] for which you can take no credit.<\/em><\/p>\n\t(HARDEN, 2021, P. 254, BOLD ADDED) <\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\t\n\n\n The way this is worded seems to imply that, even if many<\/em> of our traits are the result of genetic and environmental luck, there are some<\/em> things that we pride ourselves on that cannot be attributed entirely to genes and environment. But to what, then, can they possibly be attributed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Similarly, even though Levy\u2019s book is intended to challenge the concept of free will, he still claims that<\/p>\n\n\n\t\n\t [people] can end up with a set of dispositions and values very different from those that were the direct joint product of their genes and environment.<\/p>\n\t(Levy, 2011, p. 96)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\t\n\n\n No, they can\u2019t. That\u2019s all there is.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, Levy might argue that he said \u201cdirect\u201d in the previous quote. But as I pointed out earlier, there can only be one direct product of a gene and its environment: a protein. To argue that anything as complex as a behavioral disposition or personal value<\/em> could even conceivably be the direct product of a gene in the first place is \u201cpernicious rubbish on an almost astrological scale\u201d (Dawkins, 1987, p. 31).<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have read many books and articles from experts discussing nature and nurture in psychology, but none of them seem to escape the immanent mysticism of describing some agent operating on<\/u><\/em> the myriad factors that produce or constitute their psychology. From what I can tell, the authors of these accounts don\u2019t seem to realize that the agent just is<\/u><\/em> that very psychological constitution. Because genes and environment exhaust the factors influencing and ultimately determining behavior, the idea of of a causal \u201cagent\u201d that can be thought of as distinct from those factors is incoherent. In other words, it makes no sense for humans to \u201c[struggle] against inclinations that we have acquired due to genetic and environmental factors\u201d when the agent doing the struggling is nothing more than<\/em> the product of the interaction of those factors. If we struggle internally, that can only be a clash between different emergent components of the same combined genetic and environmental endowment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n Despite all this knowledge, most people still feel and act as though they have some sort of free will \u2014 myself included. But that fact alone fails to convince me that its existence should be taken for granted, or that we should bend over backward trying to preserve the notion after our past justifications for it have collapsed. Contrary to common wisdom, in a physicalist world, I believe the burden of proof falls on those who would claim that we do<\/em> have free will. Humans have been proven time and again to be pretty terrible reasoners under many circumstances, and countless aspects of our conscious experiences have been exposed as systematic illusions. I see no reason that libertarian free will should be different. It seems to me that people simply refuse to surrender their conception of themselves as truly, purely free agents in a metaphysical sense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, none of this means that there is no conceivable form of free will in our world, and there have been many attempts to defend some narrower versions within physicalism. Even if we don\u2019t start out with libertarian free will at conception, one could try to make the case that we gradually develop something we could call free will over the course of our lives. But if I were to make that argument, how far back in the causal chain would I have to go to say that I am responsible for my behavior? At some point in my infancy, I did not have control over my desires, thoughts, and behaviors. But if that\u2019s the case, how could I come to have control later? What could have changed between the last decision that was out<\/em> of my control and the first one that was within it? Trying to insert something like free will into these physical processes seems to produce an infinite regress (Strawson, 1994). <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is a famous argument against the existence of free will known as the consequence argument<\/em> (van Inwagen, 1983). Though the argument itself is ancient, scientific advancements have only strengthened it. If everything about an organism\u2019s environment and genes is physical, then everything that occurs during their development is ultimately the result of natural laws. The laws of physics govern the laws of chemistry, which \u2014 along with some element of randomness \u2014 govern the stitching together of a human being from chemicals in the environment according to the chemical \u201cinstructions\u201d of DNA. Under normal environmental conditions, this process eventually produces sense organs. Some of these interact with the environment in non-chemical ways, like using light-sensitive chemicals in the retina or kinetically gated ion channels in the skin. But these stimuli are still physical, and their transduction is ultimately also determined by natural laws. The information transduced is then carried along a series of neurons, themselves made up of chemicals. The neurons then collectively conduct calculations \u2014 what we might loosely call \u201ccognition,\u201d including all subconscious processes \u2014 in a network that feeds back into other types of cells in the body, ultimately generating behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When each step in the process can ultimately be attributed to either a law of nature or randomness, then at what point in this developmental process can the organism be said to have developed any sort of free will or control that can be conceived of separately from the combined effects of genetic and environmental factors? Is there some special undiscovered type of neuron that steps in and suddenly makes autonomous choices for the previously deterministic brain? As far as I can tell, no one has ever been able to identify some Rubicon past which an organism made up of cells made up of chemicals would break free from the long series of physical causal interactions that produced the organism in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But in a counterstrike against the consequence argument, Dennett (2015) points out that,<\/p>\n\n\n\t\n\t by parity of reasoning, there couldn\u2019t really be any mammals, since every mammal must have a mammal for a mother, and if you go back far enough in the family tree of any apparent mammal, you must find a manifestly nonmammalian ancestor, whose offspring just couldn\u2019t themselves be mammals, and so forth. Since we know perfectly well that we are mammals, we take this argument seriously only as a challenge to discover whatever fallacy it is that is lurking within it.<\/em><\/p>\n\t(DENNETT, 2015, P. 92)<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\t\n\n\n Dennett here is illustrating that the vagueness of concepts like free will creates a Sorites paradox<\/a>. I do agree that, resolutions to the paradox notwithstanding, this point slightly undermines the consequence argument when it comes to delineating the concept of free will. Dennett\u2019s overall argument against the idea \u201cthat one could not take full responsibility for something unless it was entirely of one\u2019s making\u201d (Dennett, 2015, p. 92) steered me slightly away from the conclusion that we could not possibly<\/em> have properties like self-determination, self-control, free will, or moral responsibility in a physical world. I think he left a crack in the door for some future physicalist defense of a form of free will. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What Dennett did not<\/em> provide, in my opinion, was a convincing argument that it is fair<\/em> to hold people morally responsible in light of all this information. Even if we do arrive at some satisfactory-yet-fuzzy definitions, I think there are still serious moral concerns about the way we treat people based on the assumption that they possess free will \u2014 concerns that I do not think Dennett addressed. For the first time when reading one of his books, I came to a point where his argument entirely lost my support \u2014 and this is where luck<\/em> comes back into the picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n Many arguments against free will have suggested something to the effect that, if we cannot identify some unique source of ownership over our own behavior, then too much of our actions are attributable to luck and not enough to skill or merit. Dennett attempts to counter this argument as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\t\n\t [W]hile we cannot take personal credit for the success of our ancestors, our genes can. \u2026And since the skills of self-control and deliberation have been put to a fairly severe test over the eons, there is a real basis in fact for our having high expectations about the deliberative skill, and more generally the capacity for self-control, of our fellow human beings.<\/em><\/p>\n\t(DENNETT, 2015, P. 102)<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\t\n\n\n I agree with the point that we are not simply lucky in existing<\/em>, since natural selection has shaped us in such a way that we competently self-perpetuate. But he seems to put a lot of emphasis on the luck of our collective existence as a species, to the exclusion of the luck that determines which extant organism you<\/em><\/u> happen to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An important but slippery concept here is that of the minimal self<\/em>, possibly also known as ipseity<\/em>: the conscious perspective to which you<\/em> have unique access, divorced from every single property \u2014 physical, mental, and otherwise \u2014 that defines \u201cyou.\u201d If someone were to make a perfect clone of you at this very instant, the only thing that would distinguish you from the clone would be your minimal self: you would (we expect) still only have access to the same conscious perspective that you currently inhabit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on this concept, in response to Dennett, it is not so much a matter of luck that<\/em> you exist, but it is entirely a matter of luck which<\/em> combination of genetic and environmental factors happens to create the mass of cells that are embodied by your particular<\/em> minimal self. As Paige Harden says, building upon John Rawls\u2019 veil of ignorance<\/a>,<\/p>\n\n\n\t\n\t if one found inequalities stemming from environmental luck disturbingly unfair, one might also find inequalities stemming from genetic luck just as disturbing: Once we are troubled by the influence of either social contingencies or natural chance on the determination of distributive shares, we are bound, on reflection, to be bothered by the influence of the other. From a moral standpoint the two seem equally arbitrary.<\/em><\/p>\n\t(HARDEN, 2021, P. 161)<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\t\n\n\n Dennett attempts to address the issue of such luck endowments with the following example:<\/p>\n\n\n\t\n\t Imagine a footrace in which the starting line was staggered: those with birthdays in January start a yard ahead of those born in February, and eleven yards ahead of those born in December. Surely no one can help being born in one month rather than another. Isn\u2019t this manifestly unfair? Yes, if the race is a hundred yard dash. No, if it\u2019s a marathon. In a marathon such a relatively small initial advantage would count for nothing, since one can reliably expect other fortuitous breaks to have even greater effects.<\/em><\/p>\n\t(DENNETT, 2015, P. 103)<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\t\n\n\n But his blithe response about the difference between a marathon and a sprint seems to ignore the fact that there will always be a distribution<\/em> of the number of lucky breaks that people receive. In effect, his argument conveniently skips over a very basic statistical concept: the standard error of the mean<\/a>. The combined luck contributed by birth month and “other fortuitous breaks” throughout each person’s life will be distributed randomly, and Dennett\u2019s point that luck \u201cwashes out\u201d can only mean that the absolute range<\/em> of the distribution is narrower: it does nothing to alter the relative ranking of the total number and degree of lucky breaks each \u201cminimal person\u201d gets. No matter what, there will be a luckiest and unluckiest person in the world \u2014 and I\u2019d be willing to bet that they would have been, respectively, January and December babies in Dennett\u2019s race. This point is nicely illustrated in this video.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Dennett bafflingly sidesteps this issue by saying that \u201c[in a marathon,] one can reliably expect other fortuitous breaks to have even greater effects [than an initial advantage]\u201d (Dennett, 2015, p. 103). I struggle to see how he could come to this conclusion without making the ludicrous assumption that most<\/em> lucky breaks will fall in the opposite direction from where their recipients started. This feels like a product of the just-world fallacy. It seems self-evident that bad and good luck can both compound<\/em>.<\/strong> If seven billion people start a footrace staggered by birthdate, some January babies will have more lucky breaks than others, and some December babies will have worse luck than others. These two groups will fill out the tail ends of the distribution of the standard error of the mean for luck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Returning to Hard Luck<\/em>, Levy compellingly argues that constitutive luck \u201ctends to ramify, not even out\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\t\n\t Badly-off agents, lacking in self-control and other resources [that other agents may have been lucky to acquire in childhood], are unable to take advantage of chance events that might have helped them compensate for their disadvantages: their bad constitutive luck prevents these events from being lucky breaks. A lack of self-control resources at age 5 may not be literally irremediable, for instance, but the events that could enable an agent to acquire such resources later in life will be rare. They will require, most probably, sustained attention by other agents, agents who themselves possess an extraordinary set of skills\u2026 Moreover, the material resources that were earlier lacking will be needed as well, perhaps in abundance. Contra Dennett, the agent is extremely unlikely to stumble onto this kind of lucky break<\/em>.<\/p>\n\t(LEVY, 2011, LOC. 2599-2608)<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\t\n\n\n\n In other words, bad luck early in life can produce more<\/em> bad luck and fewer opportunities for good luck later in life. And this idea fundamentally undermines many of Dennett\u2019s conclusions. As far as I can tell, his claims that \u201ceveryone comes out more or less in the same league\u201d (Dennett, 2015, p. 104) and that \u201cno one actually has more luck than anyone else\u201d (p. 105) are based on nothing but blind faith. Worse yet, they appear to be contradicted by simple empirical evidence and mathematical reasoning. Why wouldn\u2019t<\/em> there be a luckiest and unluckiest \u201cminimal person\u201d in the world, with a distribution between them? These are absurd claims, and nothing in his book seems to back them up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dennett does seem to implicitly acknowledge that a lower end of the luck distribution must exist:<\/p>\n\n\n\t\n\t Of course some unfortunates, though born of skilled self-controllers, are defective, through no fault of their own. We do not consider them responsible. They are excused. But we do expect a lot from the rest of us, and for good reason. We are not just lucky; we are skilled.<\/em><\/p>\n\t(DENNETT, 2015, P. 102)<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\t\n\n\n Yet he never explains why he seems comfortable drawing a line between \u201cthose who are singled out as defective\u201d (Dennett, 2015, p. 104) and those at the lower end of the spectrum of \u201cnormal\u201d citizens. Moreover, though it seems like Dennett introduces this idea to implicitly solve<\/em> the problem of the tail end of the luck distribution, he seems to ignore the grave implications of the \u201cdefective\u201d group\u2019s very existence in his schema. It seems clear to me that his \u201cdefectives\u201d are one of the groups that have received a great deal of compounded bad luck. This point should<\/em> undermine his claims about luck \u201cwashing out,\u201d but he doesn\u2019t seem to see the contradiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n It\u2019s possible that Dennett is working with the assumption that the difference between the luckiest and unluckiest people is small enough to be overcome with sheer willpower. As far as I know, we have no viable way to quantify how big of a difference there is between the two ends of the luck spectrum, so it would be difficult or impossible to make or meaningfully test Dennett\u2019s claim or any similar predictions. But either way, it seems at least conceivable that this assumption is wrong: that the gulf between the extreme ends of the distribution of lifelong luck is too large for any amount of self-discipline or willpower to bridge. To the detriment of his argument, Dennett skirts the implications of such a possibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An illuminating contrast can be drawn between Dennett\u2019s birthday-based footrace analogy and a similar one from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:<\/p>\n\n\n\t\n\t It is obvious if a man is entered at the starting line in a race 300 years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat to catch up with his fellow runner.<\/em><\/p>\n\t(KING, 1964, CH. 8, SECTION III)<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\t\n\n\n King\u2019s analogy was intended to illustrate the absurdity of expecting outcome differences between black and white Americans to simply disappear after the abolition of slavery and the end of legalized racial discrimination. But by specifying a quantified gap between the runners, King\u2019s analogy also implicitly provides a more generalized counterargument to Dennett\u2019s. I contend that being stripped of 300 years of accumulated generational wealth, and then being forced to compete with scant resources in a society with unfair systemic biases against people like you, would exceed what Dennett describes as a \u201crelatively small initial [dis]advantage.\u201d In other words, the amount of unlucky breaks a person receives could easily surpass their individual capacity to fully compensate with willpower and hard work. And I suspect this scenario is far likelier than the alternative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While I take Dennett\u2019s point that free will or self-control could be fuzzy concepts, his choice of comparison to highlight the Sorites paradox is illuminating. \u201cMammal\u201d is a practical word that we use to carve nature where no joint exists; and the same is true of a concept like free will or self-control. All Dennett has done is share his personal opinion about where he thinks it is fair to draw a line along those spectra, to determine when it is reasonable or morally justified to hold someone responsible for their behavior. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n Needless to say, I disagree with his assessment. Under some circumstances, designating an arbitrary cutoff within the spectra of self-control and moral responsibility may be necessary, as in making some legal judgments. Even where it may be useful to choose a cutoff, I would argue it should be much higher than Dennett\u2019s. But when we are discussing the moral defensibility of our social systems, I see no reason to divide things up into binaries, calling one side of each spectrum \u201cfair.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n\n Ultimately, I think the concept of fairness is where I disagree most with Dennett. Our point of conflict is most apparent in the following quote:<\/p>\n\n\n\t\n\t Imagine trying to change the rules of basketball in the following way: if the referees decide that a particular basket was just a lucky shot, they disallow the points, and if they notice that bad luck is dogging one of the teams, they give that team compensatory privileges. A perfectly pointless effort at reform, of course, which would not appeal to anybody\u2019s sense of fairness.<\/em><\/p>\n\t(DENNETT, 2015, P. 104)<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\t\n\n\n While it would be uncharitable to assume this was intentional, I think the validity of his point here rests on the implicit assumption that the purpose of basketball<\/em> is equivalent or similar to the purpose of life<\/em>. But sports are a specific category of human activity, with specific goals agreed upon by the participants: competition, entertainment, personal fitness, proving superiority, demonstrating skill, victory over others. So yes, in the context of sports, compensating for bad luck might be considered unfair. But contrary to what some people seem to believe, sports are not life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The game of life has different goals than sports, and therefore potentially very different standards of fairness. While many of the goals I listed for sports can be components<\/em> of a fulfilling human life, it would be much harder to get people to agree that any of them were the purpose<\/em> of life, let alone the purpose of society as a whole. Maybe if you\u2019re an extreme libertarian, or the personification of natural selection itself, the purpose of life is competition; and maybe if you\u2019re a fascist, the purpose of life is dominating others. But using those purposes as the yardstick by which you measure what is fair in the arena of social justice would produce, in my opinion, a very cruel moral system. I see no reason why I should value these over something along the lines of utilitarianism<\/a>; and if that\u2019s the sort of benchmark we use, I think the natural lottery is patently unfair and unjust. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The luck pincer, and the phenotype pincer by extension, imbues the biological and social worlds with an inherent unfairness that we tend to rationalize and dismiss \u2014 but I think we do so at a great moral cost. If someone uses \u201cwillpower\u201d to overcome initial strokes of bad luck, that willpower must itself<\/em> ultimately be the product of good genetic and environmental luck, as Levy and Harden suggest. We tend to think of characteristics like determination or motivation as being inherent to us as people. But regardless of whether such differences between people are more attributable to genetic or environmental variations, they all ultimately stem from some sort of physical cause that is completely dissociated from the minimal<\/em> self that ultimately embodies a given human mind. Any amount of self-control or willpower a person uses to overcome their bad-luck obstacles would ultimately be traceable through a chain of lucky breaks stretching back to a point before their conception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If, as seems mathematically inevitable, the natural world creates a distribution of luckiness, I don\u2019t know if any amount of gradual \u201cownership\u201d of one\u2019s personality or behavior could make up for that fundamental unfairness, even in principle. We will likely never be able to fully assess where any given person \u201cstarted the race\u201d \u2014 their initial environmental and genetic endowment \u2014 and it would be virtually impossible to quantify how much good or bad luck they receive throughout their life. All we can really see is where they are in the race now. That position resulted from a combination of their hard work, their initial luck at birth, and the further luck they have encountered over their lifetime. But these cannot be isolated or examined independently<\/em>, because they are operating on different levels of analysis. So why would it be fair or just to reward the person in first place, when the person in 5,000,000th could have worked equally hard \u2014 if not harder \u2014 to get to where they<\/em> are?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is this analysis that makes me highly apprehensive about the fairness or reasonableness of doling out rewards and punishments for any non-consequentialist purpose. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the concept of moral desert, as commonly conceived, does not make moral sense to me.<\/b> I don\u2019t know if we can meaningfully talk about someone earning anything, because it would be unfair to praise or reprimand people for actions resulting from traits they ultimately acquired through sheer luck. To punish and rebuke an automaton for achieving undesirable results through a completely physical causal process seems unjust, given that the \u201csuccessful\u201d automata were simply \u201cbuilt better\u201d[ii]<\/a><\/sup> for such tasks by the same mindless interactions between genes and their environments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I care deeply about preventing suffering, but I especially care about unfairly and inequitably distributed suffering. As Rawls, Levy, Harden, and others have argued, it seems wrong \u2014 cruel, even \u2014 to punish or reward people for their behavior under these circumstances. The minimal self inherently plays no part in any of this: it cannot choose what genes it bears, what environments it will live through, or the resultant phenotypes of their interactions. Yet it is the very entity that will bear all<\/em> of the pain, all<\/em> of the suffering, all<\/em> of the consequences of failure and moral sanction. Ultimately, punishment in our world is always<\/em> harming an innocent.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the grip of the luck and phenotype pincers, it\u2019s unclear how we can justify allowing or inflicting suffering on the basis of merit or moral desert. If we are nothing more than the product of our genes and environment, and those are ultimately the products of sheer luck, how could it be just for us to strive for anything other than perfect social equity? Of course, everything in life is a balancing act, and there are things that matter to us beyond equity, fairness, and social justice. Perfect equity is also likely impossible, even with future technological advancements, without some massive invasions of privacy and reductions in autonomy. But I don\u2019t think the fact that perfection is out of reach means that we shouldn\u2019t always strive for better. And I refuse to pretend that the concept of meritocracy is morally coherent or scientifically consilient just to soothe my discomfort with the status quo. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Dawkins, R. (1987). The extended phenotype: The long reach of the gene.<\/em> Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.<\/p>\n \n Dennett, D. C. (2015). Elbow room: The varieties of free will worth wanting.<\/em> MIT Press. Kindle Edition.<\/p>\n\n Dennett, D. C. (1995). Darwin\u2019s dangerous idea: Evolution and the meanings of life<\/em>. New York, Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.<\/p>\n \n Harden, K. P. (2021). The genetic lottery: Why DNA matters for social equality.<\/em> Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.<\/p>\n \n King, M.L. (1964). Why we can\u2019t wait.<\/em> New York: New American Library.<\/p>\n \n Lemos, J. (2002). Evolution and free will: A defense of Darwinian non\u2013naturalism. Metaphilosophy, 33<\/em>(4), 468-482.<\/p>\n \n Levy, N. (2011). Hard luck: How luck undermines free will and moral responsibility.<\/em> OUP Oxford.<\/p>\n \n Strawson, G. (1994). The impossibility of moral responsibility. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 75<\/em>(1\/2), 5-24.<\/p>\n \n\n\t
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Naturalizing Free Will<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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The Luck Distribution<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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Fairness and Moral Desert<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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