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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

This line of research has interesting implications for moral philosophy.

If the degree to which we are able to resist our impulses is partly determined by our genetics, does that affect our level of moral responsibility for our impulse-driven actions?

Or does it merely mean that people who are more "at risk" of having poor impulse control because of their genetics have a moral obligation to recognize that fact and take measures to combat the deficiency?

For instance, if I know that I have relatively poor impulse control, should I ask my spouse to handle our finances so I don't blow all of our money? And if I fail to do so, is that the moral failing I'm responsible for, rather than the moral failing related to making impulsive purchases?

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One thing to consider is the Pygmalion effect[0]: If you and the people around you believe you inherently lack the moral fortitude to resist those impulses, you are much more likely to make irresponsible choices. Your weakness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Then there is the risk of recreating castes. It is one thing if you abdicate the right and responsibility to control your finances, but what if that became institutionalized? What if only people who pass certain genetic tests have full citizenship rights? Maybe future governments will legalize gambling and recreational drugs, but only for those individuals that don't have a genetic predisposition to addiction.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

You could make castes based on measured behavior, not genetic predisposition which is obviously unreliable.

We do this in school by separating kids into different classes according to our guess of their ability. Not very reliable, but it can be better overall than treating everyone equally. We also do genetic "castes" with sports separating males and females. Again, some people end up on the wrong side of the fence but overall it seems to help more than it harms.

I kind of think we should do this in wider society too. As it is, naturally low intelligence or low impulse control people are just thrown in the deep end and expected to compete with people who are biologically superior. They can't win, so all kinds of negative social effects compound, like crime, poor health, poor mental health, and even lower economic success.

> We do this in school by separating kids into different classes according to our guess of their ability. Not very reliable, but it can be better overall than treating everyone equally.

Measured outcomes are generally worse overall. This system is popular with wealthy/high-status parents though.

The way to get better outcomes (in school and society) is to make sure that everyone has enough individual attention and support, not to sort and label everyone.

People who are impulsive or who integrate knowledge in a less regular way or ... are not “biologically inferior”; those differences are a complex trade-off, and our society needs a wide variety of personalities and thinking styles to function.

Respectfully, this sounds like a dystopia to me. In fact this exact structure has been described in multiple dystopian novels and movies [1]. Dividing people into castes that affect their options in life is a really really bad and dangerous idea for a litany of reasons. Regardless of whether it's based on an assessment or your bloodline, ...or anything.

Doesn't this sentence that you wrote ring any alarm bells for you? "Not very reliable, but it can be better overall than treating everyone equally."

[1] Here are a few I can think of off the top of my head:

* 3%, the tv show

* Brave New World (Huxley's book)

* Player Piano (Vonnegut's book)

The Pygmalion effect is fake. The original result was driven solely by wild outliers that indicate that those students were blowing the test deliberately or that the authors were incompetent, it was buttressed by inappropriate statistics, and, in an extremely familiar pattern now for any 'cool' environmental effect in social psychology, the hundreds of replications turned in ever tinier effects and to the extent that there is any effect, it is effectively zero in the long run: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/Teacher%20Expectations%20...

To paraphrase Nietzsche: the concept of free will was only invented [by subjugated group] in order to assign blame to [person/group in power] for their actions, and to do the inverse - justify one's (undesirable) position, i.e. "I'm in a subservient position because I choose to be, and not because I lack power / knowledge / ability."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche_and_free_w...

In the end, I think it probably leads to a form of consequentialism. It doesn't matter if you are more or less inclined to certain actions, but simply what the consequences are.

I agree with you and I think the question itself might be putting the cart before the horse. We didn't develop moral philosophy so that we could punish murderers, we started punishing murderers first because we had to and then we started thinking about how to communicate the rules and navigate the fuzzy grey areas.

It may be that free will is a philosophical dead-end but if you get rid of it then it turns out it was never all that foundational to begin with.

Nietzsche was wrong. I think, therefore I am. Free will is self evident.

Since we are all playing word games. He was wrong, but now he is accidentally right as nothing is self-evident.

The questions are the same, whether you think traits are caused mostly by genes or mostly environment. Either way, everything has a cause.

Everything has a cause but the morality changes depending on the cause.

If a person has a heart attack while driving and runs over a pedestrian, that's a tragedy all around. If a person runs over a pedestrian because they were texting while driving that's irresponsible.

The everything happens for a reason line of thinking always holds, sort of in a form of a question: is there such a thing as free will?

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