on being a person.

Suppose you had been born into a set of conditions qualitatively identical to those of John Wayne Gacy Jr. (viz.,—suppose you were born into the same environment and with the same genetic make up and so on and so forth). Would you have, by that very fact, made the identical choices that he did make? Could you have chosen to act differently than he in fact did?

1. If your answer is “YES” to the “Would you…?” and “NO” to the “Could you…?” questions: It seems that you’re committed to the idea that what one does at any particular moment is a logical consequence of all the facts that are true of a person at that particular moment. I.e., that the sufficient reason that necessitates whatever one does is some combination of her psychology/physical constitution plus her environment, and that’s it.

Problem for 1.: No one ever had a choice about the conditions she was born into. I.e., no one chooses where she is born or to whom she is born, and no one has a choice about her genetic makeup. Well, if no one has a choice about the initial conditions that one is born into, and all of her subsequent actions/choices are the product of these initial conditions, it seems that one is no more responsible for what one does at the age of 23 than what one does at the age of 1 day old. But if that’s right, then it seems someone like John Wayne Gacy Jr. is no more responsible for the evil he did than a redwood is responsible for crushing a lumberjack.

2. If your answer is “NOT NECESSARILY” to the “Would you…?” and “YES” to the “Could you…?” questions: It seems that you’re committed to the idea that what one does at any particular moment may or may not be the logical consequence of all the facts that are true of a person at that particular moment. I.e., that the combination of one’s psychological/psychical constitution plus her environment may not be sufficient to necessitate whatever she does.

Problem for 2: If there is a situation where one chooses to do something and this choosing to do something is not a logical consequence of her psychological/physical constitution plus her environment, then it seems that there is no ultimate reason why she did what she did other than the brute fact that she simply decided to do whatever it was she decided to do. And if this is right, trying to completely understand why we do what we do in terms understanding our psychological/physical constitution and our environment will turn out to be an abject failure. In the words of Chisholm, “there can be no science of man,” for like God, and unlike ordinary material objects, we can move things without ourselves being moved by anything at all.

“Let Us make Man in Our Image...” (Gen 1:26)