Another source of confusion is the difference between so-called ‘voluntary’ and ‘non-voluntary’ actions. The distinction is really between actions that reflect intentions and those that do not. If you discovered that I had intentionally poisoned someone, you would draw very different conclusions about me than if you learned I had poisoned someone accidentally. In the first case, you might conclude that I am malicious and not to be trusted whereas in the second case you might just advise me to be more careful. Intentions reveal character; accidents reveal incompetence. However, since we do not create ourselves, we are not responsible for either character or competence. The distinction between voluntary and non-voluntary actions has no bearing on questions of ultimate responsibility (although it remains extremely important for other reasons, such as assessing the risk a person may pose). To be morally accountable, it is not enough to establish someone’s intent, it must be shown that they are ultimately responsible for that intent, and that, as we have seen, is impossible. A psychopath may make many morally horrendous choices, but they will not include choosing the brain of a psychopath. Malicious choices may be voluntary; possessing a brain that makes them is not.
The nature/nurture debate also has no bearing on the question of ultimate responsibility. What counts is the fact that we are created and shaped by forces for which we are not responsible, not the combination or origin of these forces. We know that our species has been shaped, moulded and modified, and our genes divided, combined and recombined, to meet the survival challenges faced by our ancestors. Who we can become has been determined by this evolutionary process. Who we actually become is determined by the interaction with the environment we encounter thereafter.
Our genetic inheritance, which limits both our physical and mental potential, is the reason we grow arms instead of wings and noses instead of beaks. It’s also the reason we struggle to hold more than a few items in our short-term memory yet have no trouble recognising the face of an old friend. The basic blueprint for the stages of human development is encoded in our DNA and, since natural selection tends to standardise the design of a single species, our genetic similarities far outweigh our differences. The outcome is that any human child can learn any language and adopt any culture.
Evidence of this emerged in 1938 when a Stone Age society was discovered in the forests of New Guinea. Roughly a million people had lived in isolation from the rest of the world for 40,000 years. In spite of this, the genetic differences between a New Guinean baby and any other human baby turned out to be trivial: a New Guinean infant raised in any other human culture can learn its language, adapt to its diet and adopt its traditions as easily as any other child.
Interesting as such findings are, the question of ultimate responsibility is unaffected by the scope and limits of our biological potential. Whether we believe that people are born ‘blank slates’ and shaped almost completely by their environment, or in genetic determinism, which emphasises the influence of genes, or in some combination of the two (the only plausible position), the result is the same: we are the product of forces beyond our control. We do not create ourselves.
Another topic that has no bearing on the question of responsibility – even though it can often be found at the heart of debates on free will – is determinism, the idea that there is only one possible future. Whether our universe is deterministic or not, the concepts of self-creation and ultimate responsibility remain incoherent.16 A choice is either part of an unbroken chain of cause and effect or it is the product of chance. Neither option leaves any room for ultimate responsibility. If every effect has a cause, then a complete explanation of any action will take us back to the birth of the universe. But even if determinism is false — even if some events do not follow necessarily from prior causes — it still does not make us responsible. An uncaused, arbitrary event is random and a random event in our decision-making process is not compatible with any meaningful notion of responsibility. If a random event in the brain causes your arm to move, clearly the movement was not intentional.
We are not, and can never be, free from the forces that shape us. The kind of responsibility that would make us deserving of punishment or reward, credit or blame, is an illusion, a sacred myth passed on from one generation to the next with no rational basis. The impossibility of ultimate responsibility is taken for granted when we talk about anything else in the natural world – sharks, trees, apes or amoebas – but for some reason we assume humans possess it. Aspects of our culture betray an awareness of the limits on our freedom – think of the proverb, ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I’ – yet, on the whole, we go about our lives, form our opinions, educate our young and organise society according to the myth of responsibility.
No scientific finding offers any support for this myth. It is hard to imagine how any finding could. On the other hand, what we do understand about human behaviour and the brain directly contradicts it. And we have a growing number of eminent psychologists, neuroscientists and physicists to tell us so.17 Still, with or without scientific evidence, all it takes is elementary logic to expose the myth of ultimate responsibility because the idea itself is incoherent, confused and contradictory. The nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called it a ‘perversion of logic’. The belief that we can truly bear responsibility for our actions is, he wrote, ‘to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society’ – it is to believe that we can pull ourselves ‘up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness’.18
The blame game
The idea of ultimate responsibility is buried deep in the foundations of our religious traditions, political ideologies and legal systems – implicitly assumed but rarely stated. Its existence is implied by concepts like heaven, hell, sin and eternal damnation at the heart of the Abrahamic faiths. A cosmic system of condemnation and salvation only makes sense if people deserve the fates handed down to them. The concept of karma – central to Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism – has similar implications. For millennia, formal religions have played a powerful role in perpetuating the responsibility myth, justifying all manner of cruel and vicious punishments in this life and the next, often in stark conflict with other values central to their teachings.
Crude formulations of the myth also occupy a prominent position in popular culture. It has been given a huge boost by the growing ‘self-help’ movement, whose blend of materialistic values and pseudo-spirituality has fostered a multibillion-dollar industry. One of its chief exponents, Deepak Chopra, perfectly embodies the synthesis. Boasting clients from Madonna to Hillary Clinton, the appeal of Chopra’s message to the affluent and aspirational is not hard to discern: ‘People who have achieved an enormous amount of success are inherently very spiritual . . . Affluence is simply our natural state.’19
Perhaps the most successful branding of the idea came with Rhonda Byrne’s hugely popular book and film, The Secret (2006). In it we are introduced to what Byrne claims is a universal natural law – the law of attraction – which states that ‘like attracts like’, and that we can change our situation by changing our thoughts. Desirable outcomes such as good health, wealth and happiness come to those with ‘positive’ thoughts and feelings. And, by implication, undesirable outcomes come to those with ‘negative’ thoughts and feelings. Even natural disasters costing thousands of lives, the book claims, can be traced back to the negative thought patterns of the devastated communities. Byrne quotes a Dr Joe Vitale: ‘If people believe they can be in the wrong place at the wrong time . . . those thoughts of fear, separation, and powerlessness, if persistent, can attract them to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.’20
This view of human freedom is at the extreme end of the ideological spectrum, but these attitudes are influential and pervade our culture. Take, for instance, the growing problem of obesity. In a 2005 study, Abigail Saguy and Rene Almeling looked at 221 newspaper, medical and book sources and found that, while two-thirds cited individual causes of obesity, less than a third gave any mention to structural factors such as geography, longer working hours, the fast food industry or reduced income. Revealingly, the tendency of the sources to focus on personal responsibility increased when discussing particular social groups: 73 per cent of articles mentioning the poor or people of colour blamed