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Sunday, 19 January 2020

Not their fault

re: "Are My Friends’ Deaths Their Fault or Ours?" (The New York Times, January 18, 2020)


The people whose ignorance of its principles leads them to such absurdities as, “Natural selection weeding out those less fit for survival,” impressively prove their ignorance of how evolution combines with environment to make us what and who we are. It is not only that intelligence has a large inherited component that can only flower under the right surroundings, but so too do such aspects of our personality as perseverance, drive, discipline and all the other goodies that the advocates of personal responsibility tout as justifying their refusal to help those who are in need of help.

Yes, some of us are less disciplined, less intelligent, less hard working and so on than others. But we did not ask to be so: we were made what we are by a combination of nature and nurture, for neither of which we can justly be blamed. If nurture in a deprived neighbourhood combines with our genetic inheritance to breed life destroying despair, the responsibility for that cannot be laid at the door of the despairing, who neither made their own genetic nature nor created the environment that nurtured that genetic code's expression.

Whatever the reasons for a bad situation, good people would do what they can to ameliorate the bad. They would not heartlessly blame those trapped in it through no ultimate fault of their own.

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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to the The New York Times article.

It is published there
at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/opinion/sunday/deaths-despair-personal-responsibility.html#commentsContainer&permid=104706828:104706828
  

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