Genetics And Responsibility

by hilzoy

The New York Times published a truly dumb article yesterday; and since it's in my field, I thought I'd write about it. First, an excerpt:

"Although packaged with the glint of modernity, this theory actually draws from something old and wintry - the harsh remedies proposed by John Calvin, predestination's No. 1 guy. According to Calvin, our fate is determined at first creation. Similar to this, the articles of gene-ism would have us believe that our medical fate is sealed by the genes we receive at conception. Seem a bit grim?

Maybe not. Our unquestioning acceptance of the gene as prime mover has certain distinct - and ultramodern - advantages. Consider: you are no longer responsible for anything. Sound familiar? Once it was the devil. Now it is the gene that made you do it. You are officially off the hook. It isn't your fault at all. It's your faulty genes.

It gets even better. Not only is it not your fault, but you actually are a victim, a victim of your own toxic gene pool.

In the Age of Genetics, you no longer have to try to cut out smoking or think twice about gobbling that candy bar in your desk drawer. And forget jogging on a cold morning.

The die was cast long ago, from the moment the parental sperm and egg first integrated their spiraling nucleotides. The resulting package of chromosomes has programmed every step of your life. So sit back, relax and leave the driving to someone else.

But one problem remains: this new world order is at sharp odds with an older theism, that blame can and must be assigned in every human transaction. We have built a vast judicial-industrial complex that offers lawsuits for every need, satisfying varied urges like the wish for fairness or revenge, for getting rich quick or simply getting your due.

This all-blame all-the-time approach applies to much more than determining culpability should a neighbor trip on your lawn and break an arm. It also says that people are responsible for their own health - and illness. It is your fault if you develop cancer or a heart attack because you didn't eat, think or breathe right. You have allowed the corrosive effect of unresolved anger or stress or poor self-esteem to undermine your health. So if you are sick or miserable or both, it's your own darned fault.

No wonder we fled."

It's amazing: an article that is wrong in almost every particular. Where to begin?

Let's start with genes and their influence on behavior. There are some genes that really do determine huge chunks of your life. The Tay-Sachs mutation, for instance: that one little gene, all by itself, dooms you to a painful death by the age of four, and there's nothing you, or anyone else, can do about it.

Most genes, however, are nothing like this. They do not just produce results all by themselves; they interact with their environment, and what they do depends heavily on what's going on there. [UPDATE: A sentence that somehow got left out: Genes obviously do not determine 'your entire medical history'. Just ask any kid with fetal alcohol syndrome, or any smoker with lung cancer.]

Genes that affect personality, in particular, do not make it inevitable that you will gobble the candy bar in your drawer. What they do is to affect your temperament in subtler and much more general ways. They may make you a bit more impulsive, or shyer, or more equable, or more neurotic. But they absolutely do not prevent you from going jogging. The very most they might do is make you have to overcome a bit more resistance in order to get out the door.

The idea that people have different temperaments, and that these temperaments affect the kinds and degrees of temptation that we are subject to, is not the least bit novel. Back when people believed in the four humors, they thought that different people had different amounts of each, and that this accounted for temperamental differences. (That's where we get the words sanguine, melancholy, bilious, and choleric.) Choleric people fly off the handle easily, and have to guard against their tempers. Melancholy people don't have that problem, but they are prone to gloom and passivity, and have to guard against them. And so on. In the middle ages and afterwards, people believed that different people had different besetting sins: sins they were particularly prone to. Some people were given to vanity; others to self-loathing and despair. Some were given to indolence, others to rashness.

All genes do, as far as behavior is concerned, is provide a different, and (we assume) more accurate explanation for the obvious fact that different people have different temperaments, and are more or less vulnerable to different temptations. This is something we have known for centuries. Genetics has not altered it; it just explains it differently. In particular, genes no more "program every step of your life" than they "programmed" Michael Jordan to be the basketball player he was. That took a combination of genes, environment, and hard work, not genes alone.

(One way to see this is to think: if genes really did program every step of our lives, then raising children would be a whole lot easier. No need to teach them how to tell right from wrong, give them music lessons, take them to museums, or any of that: you might as well just put them in a closet, toss some food in every now and again (although if genes truly determine everything, why is food needed?), and take them out eighteen years later, when they're done. Stupid, right? So is genetic determinism.)

Next point: Moral responsibility. The author of this article says that believing in responsibility depends on "an older theism". This is just false. Moral responsibility has nothing at all to do with theism. Some theists think we're morally responsible for what we do. Others think that God, who set the cosmos in motion, is responsible for what happens, and we are just his playthings. Some atheists, like me, think we are morally responsible for what we freely and knowingly do; some don't. Theism has nothing to do with it.

But almost no one believes that we are responsible for everything that happens to us. Take cancer: sometimes, it is your fault if you get cancer: for instance, if you get lung cancer as a result of smoking. A lot of the time, though, it isn't. I can imagine some views, involving karma and the belief that everything that happens to you is in some way a reward or punishment for your behavior in a past life, according to which whatever happens to you is your fault, even if it's something like being hit by a meteorite. But most people who believe in moral responsibility don't think anything like this. They (we) think, instead, that we are responsible for what we knowingly and freely do, and for the foreseeable results of our choices. They do not think we're responsible for being hit by a meteorite, getting most kinds of cancer, innocent mistakes, and so on.

So: the author of this piece is wrong about genes, and wrong about responsibility. It's not entirely clear that he accepts the views he talks about -- half the time he seems to be ridiculing them -- but he doesn't ever explain what's actually wrong with them.

There are people who think that genes literally force us to do things. And not just things like having a harder than normal time with impulse control, which isn't actually something we do, but things like eating that second bowl of ice cream. If you stop and think about it for a moment, this idea is nuts. But it's worth explaining why it's nuts; and why genes don't show much of anything about moral responsibility. Contrasting an idiotic 'gene-ism' to an equally idiotic version of theism, and failing to even suggest that there are alternatives to these two ludicrous views, is a real disservice.

***

Extra note: do not read this if you don't like philosophy!

The real threat to freedom of the will is determinism: the view that every event is fully determined by previous events, in accordance with natural laws. If this is true, then whether we know it or not, every thought we have and every choice we make is completely caused by what went before, and in a fairly important sense, we couldn't have done anything other than what we actually did. Genes could be part of such a story: given our genes, plus our environment, plus anything else you think might be relevant, we had to turn out as we did, and we had, in particular, to decide not to go jogging, to eat that candy bar, and so forth. This is the die that really does threaten to have been cast before our birth.

Now: determinism is false (at least, so the physicists tell me.) But, oddly, this doesn't seem to help much. An indeterministic event is one that is not caused by anything. When a uranium atom emits an electron, the same physicists tell me, nothing determines which one it will emit. It is purely random.

Suppose that whenever I made a choice, some indeterministic event just happened in my brain, and it, suitably amplified in some way, determines what I do next. If it happens one way, I go jogging; if it goes another way, I don't. An indeterministic event is really not caused by anything, so (had it happened differently) I could have chosen differently. Does that solve the problem of my freedom? Not that I can see, since it's very hard to see the decision whether or not to go jogging as my decision, or as being up to me, if it really was just random. And it's even harder to see why I should be held responsible for that decision.

So -- yikes -- freedom and responsibility seem to be in trouble whether determinism is true or false. If you accept the arguments thus far, there are two main options: first, give up on freedom and responsibility, and second, ask yourself whether trying to construe freedom and responsibility in these terms isn't somehow misguided. Maybe we're looking for freedom in the wrong place, so to speak: to borrow an example from Stanley Cavell, like a kid who says: I saw the Statue of Liberty, I saw Broadway, I saw Houston Street, but where was New York City? -- imagining it to be a building or a street or something, but not one of the buildings and streets he saw.

If the causal story is the wrong sort of thing to be looking at, if you're looking for freedom and responsibility, that would explain why we so completely fail to find it there. Of course, one would have to provide an alternative story in order to make this second response plausible. Here I'll just say: I tried to do that, as have others. And the majority view among people who have thought about this professionally is that neither determinism nor any such general causal story that's remotely consistent with our experience implies that we are not free, or that we aren't morally responsible for what we do.

So when you hear people say: oh no, we are explaining more and more of human behavior, and each time we do this, we turn out to be less and less responsible, it's worth recalling that this is not the majority view among people who think about moral responsibility for a living. Most of us think it's perfectly possible to be free and morally responsible, even if there is a good scientific explanation for what we do.

Comments

[J.D.]

The good doctor dreams of being a celebrated prose stylist. Within the piece there are wonders of cantering cadence, there are pleasures unbearably prosodic. Nay, I say! Nay to your expectations of qualification, to your demands for a factual grounding that would only serve to ground art's lofty flight! Reason and logic, these low engines of your perverse consummation, should never -- never! -- stain the cloak of the omnivorous pontificator.

(Loved your post, btw)

[felixrayman]

Are dogs free and morally responsible for what they do? Infants? An AIDS virus? The sun? If no to any of the above, what is the distinction between them, in terms a physicist would use and understand? If yes to any of the above, does "free and morally responsible" really mean anything?

And if we are going to talk pure and useless philosophy, you should give up on the terrible and damaging conceit that there is any such thing as "you".

[hilzoy]

No to all of the above. Since I have announced my intention of not looking for freedom and/or responsibility in the details of the causal structure of the universe, why should I be constrained by the terms physicists use? (I grant, of course, that I should use terms that English-speaking physicists, at least, understand.)

And why should I give up on 'me'? (Asking seriously; just completely unclear as to your reasons.)

[rilkefan]

"Now: determinism is false (so the physicists tell me)"

Just the evil, wrong ones.

I certainly think morality is a) inconsistent with physics of whatever sort and b) undefinable in a way sensible to a physicist.

A bit more here for those who like incoherent gestures at argument.

"why should I be constrained by the terms physicists use?"

Wittgenstein, _Tractatus_, 6.53, that's why.

[felixrayman]

No to all of the above

What is the difference between the way a dog thinks and the way a human thinks that makes humans "free and morally responsible" but not dogs? How does determinism or any such general causal story that's remotely consistent with our experience imply that dogs are not free, or that they aren't morally responsible for what they do? How about chimpanzees, who share >99% of human DNA? Are humans the only species of animal that is "free and morally responsible"? Not even the Neanderthals were? If you would argue any of the above, I believe you are making a religious statement rather than a reasoned argument.

And why should I give up on 'me'? (Asking seriously; just completely unclear as to your reasons.)

Since we seem to be discussing religious concepts, the concept of "you" is a distinction that has little to do with the way the universe works, as far as it can be discerned. It is an artificiality.

[Anarch]

I certainly think morality is a) inconsistent with physics of whatever sort and b) undefinable in a way sensible to a physicist.

To wax truly pedantic, a) and b) cannot both hold: if a property is undefinable it can't also be inconsistent since you can't ever talk about it in the same language as the ground theory. It'd make more sense to say that (our current understanding of) morality and physics are orthogonal, or independent, or something of that nature.

[Barry Freed]

Since we seem to be discussing religious concepts, the concept of "you" is a distinction that has little to do with the way the universe works, as far as it can be discerned. It is an artificiality.

True, especially for that which pertains to the realm of morality. The same, however, does not hold for that of "thou."

[Slartibartfast]

Since we seem to be discussing religious concepts, the concept of "you" is a distinction that has little to do with the way the universe works, as far as it can be discerned. It is an artificiality.

The distinction of distinction also has little to do with the way the universe works, as do all the pixels in this sentence. Still, it'd get pretty boring if we all just sat back and watched.

[DaveC]

There have been times that I have really, really wanted to do something that may have been good,or fun, for me, but I did not go ahead. I wasn't worried about how I could be affected legally, whether I'd be thrown in jail, but just considered whether my actions would be right or wrong. Certinly there are a lot of circumstances influencing my decisions, but in the end, I ultimately make those decisions.

On the other hand, the events that happen to me are not completely under my control. Children don't determine the characteristics of their parents, and how that will affect their lives, for example.

[rilkefan]

"if a property is undefinable it can't also be inconsistent since you can't ever talk about it in the same language as the ground theory."

Is that right? I think I'm saying a) A->B and C->~B so C->~A and b) ~A,
or something like it. E.g., mathemeticians did math for a long time using badly-defined objects (curves come to mind), or was that not math?

[felixrayman]

mathemeticians did math for a long time using badly-defined objects (curves come to mind), or was that not math?

If mathematicians using badly-defined objects and well-defined operations on those objects produced contradictions, it was math.

[rilkefan]

Tractatus 6.5.

[felixrayman]

What would Godel say about Tractatus 6.5?

[John Thullen]

"Dogs run free; why not we?"

Bob Dylan ... long ago.

[bob mcmanus]

Shame we have such difficulty thinking in terms of partial or divisible responsibility;"either we are free or not free". I guess in general we have difficulty handling multiple independent (or interdependent?) variables, but it is especially hard to say:"I have 80% personal control over my weight."

Is this an artifact of ethical language?

[hilzoy]

To be clearer about physics, now that I'm not sleepy any more:

I took felixrayman's 'in the language used by physicists' to mean: 'used by physicists while doing physics', of course. Now: there are lots and lots of things that physicists will not talk about, as such, while doing physics, that nonetheless exist. Consider, oh, writing. I would think that if a physicist were examining a piece of paper with some writing on it, s/he would consider, say, the properties of the various particles that made up the piece of paper, its mass, and so forth, but while s/he might or might not be interested in some properties of the little black marks, s/he would not describe those black marks as writing, nor would s/he in any way concern him- or herself with what they said.

Now: writing plainly exists, and we are capable of understanding what it means. But if I talk about it, I have apparently fallen afoul of felixrayman's strictures.

I would suggest, instead, that if we want to limit ourselves in some related way, we limit ourselves to talking about things that are consistent with physics. For the fact that those black marks are writing, while it's not something that a physicist (in her capacity as physicist) will discover, it's plainly consistent with physics, since it doesn't e.g. posit spooky extra particle-like entities. (Celestial drops are inconsistent with physics: they are supposed to have properties of the sort that are normally discovered by physics, but that somehow physics itself can't find. The existence of writing is not inconsistent with physics: it requires only normal physical particles, suitably arranged, which we interpret using concepts that physics doesn't use one way or the other.)

Now: I am perfectly happy to accept this restriction. I do not want to go positing strange spooky entities. I do not, myself, think that freedom, responsibility, or the self requires that I do so.

[Sulla]

For once Hilzoy you and I are in complete agreement on something. It was bound to happen sooner or later I guess.

[Brad]

On whether contemporary physics says that determinism is false: This is controversial. According to the 'textbook' understanding of quantum mechanics, the theory is indeterministic. But there are all sorts of problems with the textbook understanding. (It says that the wavefunction collapses whenever a quantum system is observed; but what constitutes an observation?) And there are other interpretations of quantum mechanics according to which it is a deterministic theory after all. So the jury's still out on this one.

You also say in your post that 'an indeterministic event is not really caused by anything.' That's not true. Suppose I have a big red button hooked up to a bomb and that pressing the button only makes it _more likely_ that the bomb explodes; it fails to determine whether the bomb explodes. Nevertheless, if I push the button and the bomb goes off, then my pushing the button certainly was a cause of the bomb's exploding.

[hilzoy]

About an event caused by an indeterministic event (among other things): the event caused in this way may also be caused by other things, but (as I understand it) the indeterministic event itself is not.

[Francis / Brother Rail Gun of Reasoned Discourse]

wasn't phlegm one of the humors, leading people to be phlegmatic?

[given the rarity of such persons on this blog, you can be forgiven for having forgotten.]

[hilzoy]

Eek, you're right, Francis. Bilious and choleric seem to refer to the same humor. Thanks.

[Kyle Hasselbacher]

It says that the wavefunction collapses whenever a quantum system is observed; but what constitutes an observation?

I'm not a physicist, but I've always thought of it as "transfer of energy" as in "light travels as waves but transfers energy as particles." It has to transfer energy to be measured, and measurement is observation.

[Anonymous David Albert reader]

Brad's right--whether QM is deterministic or not is controversial. In most intro text on quantum mechanics you are presented with two postulates which don't fit together very well, but allow you to use QM without worrying about whether it is truly describing reality correctly. First you're told that there's an equation (Schrodinger's equation) which completely determines the behavior of the wave function. It's a first order partial differential equation in the time variable, so if you know it now its future behavior is determined. But the wave function is a probability amplitude and so you find out that sometimes a system can be in a superposition of two or more different states. So then there's postulate two, which says you can calculate the probability of various outcomes using the wave function, which "collapses" into one of the states randomly when you make the measurement.

The contradiction is that the collapse of the wave function is not described by Schrodinger's equation--it's a deus ex machina kind of thing. Schrodinger's equation is supposed to describe reality and it's deterministic, but the measurement process, according to that second postulate, isn't deterministic. Since measuring instruments are made of atoms, you can hypothetically include the instrument and the physicist in a bigger wave function describing them all, but then you get a quantum superposition of physicists getting different results. That's where the many worlds interpretation of QM comes in. You say that QM is deterministic, but you go on to say that the world is constantly splitting into more and more copies. There's also Bohm's interpretation, but I don't remember how it goes. I think it is deterministic, but don't remember how it goes. I think the current favorite explanation among physicists is something involving "decoherence"--as best I can tell, it explains why in practice you'd never expect to see macroscopic objects in quantum superpositions (You could neverand kinda jumps over the philosophical question about whether there are alternative realities that come into existence when we make measurements. I'm not sure I'm interpreting them correctly.

David Albert wrote a good book about this stuff many years ago, which I'm re-reading. (Quantum Mechanics and Experience--I'm too lazy to go look for the book and find the title, but that might be right). He doesn't like the decoherence view much, and thinks the adherents are missing the point, so you might be better off finding someone else to explain that viewpoint.

On the determinism thing, my guess is that if we are free (and we seem to be) that maybe free will is a basic thing (I don't know what language to use) not reducible or explainable in simpler terms. I've heard that argument that indeterminism isn't helpful to the case for free will, because random quantum perturbations (assuming QM is random for the moment) don't give us what we'd call free will. But why assume the choice is between determinism and randomness? Maybe our choice-making ability is in its own category, even if we can't understand how it could be? There's no reason why we have to be comprehensible to ourselves, is there?

[Ginger Yellow]

Dennett's Freedom Evolves has a very interesting take on the whole determinism and free will question, although I'm not sure I buy it. It's certainly not as convincing as Consciousness Explained, but it's worth reading anyway. He too is of the opinion that an indeterministic world is more problematic for free will than a deterministic one, or at least that a Penrose style indeterminacy generator in the brain would actually take away free will.

[DrDave]

It's not entirely clear that he accepts the views he talks about -- half the time he seems to be ridiculing them -- but he doesn't ever explain what's actually wrong with them.

Yep, that was more or less my take. I thought the author was just being facetious in the face of what he thought was ridiculous and preposterous. (John Calvin's theory of predistination, that is.)

[felixrayman]

Still waiting on someone to explain why a human is free and a dog isn't....

[Anarch]

Is that right? I think I'm saying a) A->B and C->~B so C->~A and b) ~A,
or something like it. E.g., mathemeticians did math for a long time using badly-defined objects (curves come to mind), or was that not math?

In my particular branch of logic, you can actually demonstrate that certain properties are undefinable because, if they were, it'd lead to a contradiction, i.e. an inconsistency with known results. [Typical example: "definable" is not, itself, a definable property. Weird, huh?] I am, I suppose, assuming the consistency of your ground theory in order to make these claims, but yeah, "definable" and "inconsistent" are pretty much incompatible in anything like classical logic.

[Patrick]

Is free will really a necessary thing? I mean, in all seriousness, what's the big deal?

Lets posit a world in which we have revealed that there is no such thing as free will. What would follow from that? We might lack "justification" for imposing "morality" on people? We might feel bothered that our intuitive feelings about our own mind were not actually true? Really, I doubt either of those would be a big problem.

Lets say we agree a dog hasn't got free will. Do we all stop teaching our dogs to behave, and to react in relation to our approval or disapproval? Of course not. We'd continue on just like before.

Even were free will rejected, we'd still be creatures which possess certain desires and not others, and who seek to create structures which utilize all available tools, including moral persuasion, to cause others around us to adopt forms of behavior we find more worthwhile.

Really, it almost seems like there is an unspoken discussion going on, regarding the nature of morality. If you believe that morality exists external to the wants of human beings, that it is something more than societal norms with emotional weight, you may be committed to free will like it or not.

[Slartibartfast]

Still waiting on someone to explain why a human is free and a dog isn't....

Because with a dog, you at least have to pay for the rabies shots.

[Matt McIrvin]

About halfway down I was going to argue with hilzoy's article, but I was just getting ahead of the argument.

It's true that there's controversy over how indeterministic quantum mechanics is, but it doesn't really affect the dilemma hilzoy sketched out. In the many-worlds view the whole wave function is deterministic, but any individual coarse-grained path you draw through the thicket of superpositions is not. Then there's the Bohmian pilot-wave view in which everything really is deterministic except for the vagaries of initial conditions, but that just brings us back to the other alternative, the clockwork deterministic universe. It doesn't make much difference whether the dice rolls are played out on the spot or pre-recorded in hidden form at the beginning of time.

[Matt McIrvin]

Anonymous David Albert Reader said:

"But why assume the choice is between determinism and randomness? Maybe our choice-making ability is in its own category, even if we can't understand how it could be? There's no reason why we have to be comprehensible to ourselves, is there?"

It seems to me that if that's true-- a really dualistic universe, in which there's an extraphysical choice-making engine in our heads that is neither deterministic nor random-- then in principle that process is logically equivalent to a functioning Maxwell demon, so it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics and could be used to construct an entropy-reducing device. (I wrote a science-fiction story with that as the punch line once, except turned around backwards.)

It would be peculiar if violations of the Second Law happened in our own brains and nowhere else in the world. That is not to say it couldn't possibly be true, but it would be pretty astonishing. Maybe the out is that the mechanism has to be inherently resistant to reductionistic analysis so that any attempt to turn it into a Maxwell demon and build a Carnot-limit-violating refrigerator with it will fail. But now my brain's starting to hurt.

[rilkefan]

Patrick: yup.

[Anarch]

Matt: It's possible -- as has been suggested by Roger Penrose (rather patly IMO) among others -- that there's a sort of Godelian restriction against us understanding the nature of our own consciousness. The argument runs something like this: since Godel's 2nd Incompleteness Theorem means that no system can prove its own consistency and since consciousness, or rather the reasoning derived from consciousness, is such a system, the human mind will never be able to apprehend the full extent of its powers.

[I'm not in the slightest bit convinced by this, btw, but that's the argument as put forth in The Emperor's New Mind, IIRC.]

[kenB]

Here's the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy on compatibilism, which is essentially the topic under discussion. Chances are that whatever your thoughts and opinions on the subject are, someone else has already had them and published them and you'll find them described and challenged in this article. Anyway, that was certainly my experience.

Also, here's an episode of Philosophy Talk on the same subject, which includes a bit with a certain Johns Hopkins professor of philosophy whom you may recognize.

[hilzoy]

kenB: Wow, my voice came out sounding strange. -- The Stanford article is thorough, but also occasionally dumb, imho. A good intro to the problem is here.

[kenB]

Oh, hadn't you listened to it before? Anyway, I've never been famous enough to be on radio show, but whenever I hear a recording of my voice, it seems so oddly high-pitched and non-resonant that I wonder why anyone ever takes me seriously. If in fact anyone ever does.

Thanks for the link -- I had landed on the other one more or less at random some months ago, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it wasn't the best write-up ever done.