The Genetics of Crime and Punishment
10th October 2026
Harden uses this autobiographical episode as a springboard into deeper philosophical questions about what it means to be responsible in an era when science can predict who is more likely to commit a crime based purely on their DNA. She ponders whether we should take people’s genetics into account when deciding “whether and how they should be punished for the sins they commit.” She asks, “Does science let us off the hook … or is science, in the end, as accusatory as a bad acid trip…?” Importantly, she tackles these questions about causation and responsibility as someone who was “raised religious and fled the church as an adult,” addressing her book to “modern, enlightened” readers like herself who “don’t believe in God anymore.”
Harden made a first attempt to grapple with these questions in her previous book, The Genetic Lottery, in which she sought to put a progressive spin on the finding that current social inequalities are partly due to genetic differences between people. Unfortunately, both of Harden’s books fail to confront the hard choices that a naturalistic worldview presents us with, though each fails to meet this challenge in a different way. The naturalistic worldview implies that all human behaviour has non-supernatural causes of one kind or another. Insofar as that view is accepted, there are only two possibilities: either moral responsibility is compatible with the comprehensive causation of human behaviour or moral responsibility cannot exist. We might call this the “determinist’s dilemma.”
It doesn’t matter whether our genes determine our behavior: The body, like an economy, is a system so complex that it is effectively unpredictable, and therefore the results are exactly the same as if we had free will. Do some reading on chaos theory and it will open your eyes. (Or just go watch the first 15 minutes of Jurassic Park.)