to privatize social security, the deregulation of banking, the health care wars, the refusal to bail out homeowners in the wake of the 2008 housing meltdown – have all been fueled by our collective sense that if things go badly for you, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself’.33 The more responsibility that is laid at the feet of individuals, the easier it is to justify the many inequalities in our world. If addicts, sinners, refugees, prisoners, the homeless, the obese, the unemployed and the poor can be blamed for their condition, there is little obligation to help them.
If we believe that each person bears ultimate responsibility for their lot in life, it is far easier to justify discrepancies in power, wealth and opportunity. If the rich deserve their privilege and the poor their destitution, perhaps things are as they should be. As Herman Cain, former Republican Party presidential candidate, declared: ‘Don’t blame Wall Street. Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.’ 34 But no behaviour occurs in isolation. Every choice is the result of heredity, experience and opportunity. Billionaire Warren Buffett recognises more clearly than most the decisive role of luck: ‘Most of the world’s seven billion people found their destinies largely determined at the moment of birth . . . [F]or literally billions of people, where they are born and who gives them birth, along with their gender and native intellect, largely determine the life they will experience.’35
As soon as we place human behaviour in the wider context of cause and effect, a framework that takes into account the steering power of genes and environment, the decisive role of luck in our lives becomes obvious. Simply to exist is extraordinarily lucky, the odds are so incredibly small. Over 90 per cent of all the organisms that have existed on this planet died without producing offspring.36 The fact that you’re reading this means that every one of your ancestors, since life on Earth began, escaped that fate. Luck continues to dominate after birth. A baby born in Japan is fifty times more likely to reach its first birthday than a baby born in Angola.37 An African-American infant is twice as likely to pass away in its first year as a white American child.38 From 1990 to 2015, the number of children who died before their fifth birthday – mostly from preventable diseases – is roughly 236 million.39 And if we make it into adulthood free from abuse, violence, neglect, war, famine, malnutrition, physical or mental illness, extreme poverty, debilitating injury, or the loss of a parent or sibling, we are luckier than most.
The abilities and capacities we possess can also be chalked up to good fortune. Whether we have the brain of an Isaac Newton or the speed of a Usain Bolt is really a matter of chance. What’s more, the psychological tools to make the most of our opportunities and talents are themselves down to luck. Confidence is key to taking advantage of opportunities – to embarking on an ambitious task or showing resilience in the face of setbacks and failure. Yet our levels of self-belief are highly sensitive to the treatment we receive in childhood, and for that we are not responsible. Be it patience, innovation, concentration, creativity, perseverance or self-control, no capacity is equally distributed across the population. Walk into any classroom and you will find some children who can sit happily for hours studying and others who find it unbearable, some who are brimming with self-belief and others undermined by self-doubt. Different brains have different capacities and, as we know, no one chooses their own brain. Whether we are the star pupil or a dropout, disciplined or distracted, motivated or lazy, is ultimately a matter of luck.
Decades of research have revealed the impact of early experiences on the development of our innate capacities. For instance, children from lower-income families with less-educated parents enter school far behind their wealthier counterparts in language skills. The amount of time our care-givers spend conversing, reading and playing with us – and the quality of those interactions – all makes a difference to our development. Stanford psychologists have shown that two-year-old children from poor families may already be six months behind in language development.40 By age four, children in middle- and upper-class families hear in the region of 30 million more words than children from families on welfare.41 A study conducted by the Scottish Centre for Social Research (SCSR), which tracked the abilities of 14,000 youngsters, found that by age five, children with degree-level educated parents are, on average, a year and a half ahead of their less privileged counterparts in terms of vocabulary and around thirteen months ahead on problem-solving.42
A life-journey depends on a wide range of unpredictable factors. Variations in genes and experience do not need to be large to have an impact on the paths we take. Small variations can have significant repercussions, setting in motion events that result in completely different outcomes. In chaos theory, this is known as the ‘butterfly effect’. With a slight tweak in starting conditions, the man who dies at twenty-five from a drug overdose might have lived to hug his grandchildren. The woman who wins the Nobel Prize in Literature might, with a small change in early circumstances, have spent her life as a housewife never to discover her talent. When we hit a crucial fork in the road – whether or not to steal, cheat, retaliate, take a risk, quit a job, revise for an exam or remain in an abusive relationship – apparently trivial variations can make all the difference, nudging us one way or another. At decisive moments, an attentive friend, an inspiring book, a caring teacher, a strong role model, a smiling stranger, even good weather or a long night’s sleep, may be enough to prevent us making a costly error.
Some people defy every expectation, achieving remarkable things in the face of adversity. It is tempting to view such lives as evidence that we can, after all, be the masters of our own destiny, but to do so would be a mistake. Forces beyond our control determine the resources – psychological, physical and material – at our disposal to carve out a new path, and these resources, along with countless other twists of fate, ultimately determine how successful we will be in our attempt. For every unlikely success story there are countless people of equal potential who died in poverty and obscurity due to the crushing force of circumstance. Just because the odd person wins the lottery does not mean the game isn’t rigged for everyone else to lose.
By casting off the defunct ideology of credit and blame, we can get to work on understanding the deeper roots of behaviour: familial, genetic, economic and political. This is a necessary antidote to the lazy belief that the buck of responsibility stops with the mystical ‘free agency’ of the individual. Such thinking is reminiscent of primitive attempts to construct theories of the natural world. In order to explain why some things rise and others fall, Aristotle spoke of how ‘bodies’ move to their ‘natural place’: apples fall because it is in their nature to fall; steam rises because it is in its nature to rise. Such wordplay serves only to conceal our ignorance. Just as for falling apples and rising steam, there are reasons why people behave the way they do, reasons that take us far beyond the will of the individual.
Our talents, attitudes, inclinations and opportunities are the products of forces we do not control. Debate still rages over the relative importance of biological and environmental factors but the responsibility myth has been debunked and, with it, the grounds for credit and blame.43 It may be intuitively compelling, flattering for the fortunate and expedient for the powerful, but ultimate responsibility is a myth, an irrational dogma that causes great harm to many people.
Luck has been the decisive force in the life of every person who has ever lived. And, be it good or bad, nothing we do makes us more or less deserving of the luck we receive. If ultimate responsibility is an incoherent concept, the notion of desert – that we can be truly deserving of reward or punishment – also loses meaning. If we are not truly responsible for what we do, then what we do cannot make us more or less deserving of pain or pleasure, suffering or joy. Punishment and reward may serve important pragmatic functions, providing incentives for the kinds of behaviour we want to cultivate in society, but that is a separate issue – one to be explored in the following two chapters.44
I should add that there is another use of the word ‘deserve’ that is not affected by these views on responsibility. A frail old lady on a bus deserves a seat more than a healthy young woman. A single mother of three deserves a state subsidy more than a multi-million-dollar
