Can an individual really be said to have a “choice” in a matter if overwhelming environmental factors caused the determination of that choice?
So as to not be too vague, let me ask that a bit more precisely: What are some examples where society lays responsibility on an individual for his or her actions, even though those actions were caused by environmental/societal factors? Conversely, what are some examples where society blames the environment instead and finds the individual free of fault?
To give you some context, this is a spinoff of my Where’s the evidence that says “gay people are born gay”? thread. In that thread, people seemed to make the assumption that “caused by society/the environment” equals “a matter of personal choice”.
I would like to question that assumption. It seemed implied (by some) that homosexuality is caused by environmental factors, and thus it is a personally changeable aspect of one’s lifestyle, like weight loss or vegetarianism. At what point does society say, for a given scenario, that social conditioning and/or environmental factors so thoroughly brainwashed or traumatized an individual that he or she is no longer able to freely choose the alternatives?
Not really. To use an extreme example, that’s why it’s not consensual sex if I drug a woman’s drink, or torture her into compliance. Those are both environmental influences, and both can overwhelm anyone. The environment can be just as coercive as genes, despite how people like to equate “environment” with “free will”, and “genes” with “determinism”.
In the first case; blaming someone for thievery while starving. Or for lashing out when persecuted. As for the latter, the “gay panic” defense for assault or murder comes to mind ( not that good an example; I’m drawing a bit of a blank ).
Not necessarily. When you are talking about development in the womb, the environment in question, you are talking about a period where basic brain wiring is going on. That can be just as unchangeable by an effort of will as anything directly imposed by genes.
At the extremes. I know that’s not a very useful way to put it, but I don’t think there’s a neat bright line we can point to and say that “beyond here, he had no choice”. Most of the time it’s more of a grey area, where choice is compromised but not truly absent.
Someone in the GQ thread you linked made the very good point that the problem of defining “a homosexual” is very much lurking in the background of the issues you raise.
Also, even if environmental factors make it more likely for someone to have a same gender sexual preference, doing anything to act on that preference is obviously a choice. Before anyone responds, please read the sentence immediately before this one to say only what it says and kindly don’t pretend to know my feelings on any number of issues that could be impacted by it. Doing anything to act on an opposite-gender sexual preference is also a choice.
Finally, the policy implications one makes by defining homosexuality as a choice come with their own set of debatable issues, so it’s not clear that if it’s a choice then it’s OK to outlaw or for a religion to say it’s taboo.
We don’t know what causes an individual to become a pedophile. Certainly it’s not uncommon for pedophiles to, themselves, have been abused as children. But there certainly may be other causes as well . . . genetic, hormonal, environmental . . . none of which is within the individual’s control; he didn’t “choose” any of these factors. So in that sense he’s not responsible for the fact that he has pedophilic feelings.
But (assuming that he is now an adult) if he acts on those feelings . . . that action is a choice, and he is responsible.
The problem here for me is the idea that government policy should directly flow from the choice/non-choice dichotomy. If tomorrow, we discovered that pedophilia was completely genetically determined, that wouldn’t suddenly make me think that pedophilia should be legal. And conversely, if we discovered that homosexuality was completely a choice, that wouldn’t make me think that consensual homosexual behavior should be illegal. These are interesting scientific issues, but when it comes down to setting government policy, I think we should focus on (a) whether a particular action causes harm to anyone else, and if so (b) how do we prevent such harmful actions from occurring.
The truth is, we can objectively explain almost any action if we study it hard enough. Our old philosophy of “responsibility” and “fault” and “blame” does not jive with the truth of determinism.
The truth is, we should not change our law. We should change our philosophy. We do not punish to give the right end to the evil. We punish to create another environmental factor, that is meant to contribute to the effect we want. This willed factor carries cost in life and suffering, and we can never forget what punishment is (the way we have liked to). But we cannot do away with it.