@DamienMorris
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Hi Bryan,View quoted post on X
I'm a longstanding fan of your work, but you risk propagating a philosophical mistake in this piece which the legal philosopher Michael S Moore calls "epistemic libertarianism". This is the idea that free will somehow lurks in the causes of human behaviour that science hasn't explained yet. But why would the causes of human behavioural variation that we know about infringe on our freedom more than the causes that we don't know about?
Taking your example of the evil identical twin, unless you believe in contra-causal supernatural freedom, SOMETHING caused the evil twin to become evil (whether it's developmental noise in the womb, the cold they caught when they were five, or the tweets they read that their twin did not). Why would IGNORANCE of the specific genetic or environmental causes of someone's behaviour make them more free? Unless you are a libertarian incompatibilist, the nonshared environmental variation in behaviour is just as "deterministic" as the heritable and shared environmental variation. There's no escape hatch from causal determinism.
If human agency and moral responsibility exist (as I believe they do), it cannot hinge on whether our behaviour was caused, or whether we know about its particular causes in each instance. Traditionally, moral responsibility has hinged on possessing certain capacities (being a sane adult without significant mental impairments), not on being partially free from (known) genetic and environmental causes.
In behavioural genetics, the chief proponent of the idea that "the nonshared environment... is free will" is Eric Turkheimer (2011). However, the same idea has been cropping up for over a century (indeed, you're original EconLib post appears to have anticipated Turkheimer's argument by more than two years!). An environment-only version of this idea bedevils the social sciences, where it drives woke policy conclusions that measured causes of inequality are inherently unjust and must therefore be eliminated. In 2021, Kathryn Paige Harden brought Turkheimer's idea to a larger audience in her book 'The Genetic Lottery', where she used it to argue for genetic affirmative action. However, in her new book, 'Original Sin' even she has begun to spot the holes in this idea, as I discuss in my recent review of her book in Quillette (happy to ping you an unpaywalled copy if you DM me).
I see that you do not base your own belief in free will on the magnitude of nonshared environmental estimates for behavioural outcomes (kudos!), but please recognise that any theory which does risks diminishing rather than protecting people's belief in personal responsibility, risks making personal responsibility hostage to scientific progress, and risks making people needlessly hostile towards scientific explanations for human behaviour (what Daniel Dennett called the fear of "creeping exculpation").
x.com/Quillette/stat…
Can your genes excuse a crime?View quoted post on X
@DamienMorris reviews @kph3k 's Original Sin and argues that its answer amounts to a kind of secular Calvinism.
quillette.com/2026/10/10/the…
Overreaching on Genes? econjwatch.org/ancillary/book…
Rosalind Arden and Robert Plomin, John Benning, Noah Carl, Nikolai Eftedal, Joe Francis, Charles Murray, Jan Stuhler, and Greg Clark
Titles include:
Overreaching on Genes
Who’s Afraid of Gregory Clark?
Survival of the Richest
To Have and Have Not
To Know and Know NotView quoted post on X
