Is It Appropriate to Praise Or Blame People for Their Behaviour?

In order to decide how appropriate it is to praise/blame people for their behaviour, it must be ascertained to what extent a person’s behaviour is determined by his genes. If a person’s disposition is due entirely to his genes, then surely it is unfair to praise/blame him for his actions caused by such a disposition.

Many believe that our characteristics are determined not by our genes, but by the environment in which we grow up. In this view, we are born blank slates with no innate traits. The interaction of our genetic coding and our environment make it difficult for us to tell how large a role each plays in determining our personalities and behaviour. Even if it is the case that our characteristics are the result of the environment in which we have been reared, surely the same moral question arises, for again we can be seen merely to be (in Richard’s words,) “blameless puppets.”This essay is concerned with the extent to which blame/praise can be applied whatever the balance of nature versus nurture.

The reason that many believe that our dispositions are due to our genetic coding is that we often behave in very similar ways to our parents. If our parents are intelligent, then usually we are too. In the same way, if our parents are prone to being careful in all their actions, then we usually share this characteristic. This view has been supported by research about adopted children. The Colorado Adoption Project discovered that as we age genes increase in influence. Between the ages of 3 and 16, adopted children grow to be more like their birth parents in height, weight, and IQ. Thus, as children grow old, their home environments have less impact on their personalities. This is certainly believed by Gould, who has championed the notion that genetic characteristics, both physical and mental, are unavoidable. In his view, therefore, our dispositions that lead us to behave in certain ways are due entirely to our genetic coding. If this is the case, should we be blamed/praised for such behaviour?

To further our understanding of such matters, research has been made by looking for traits that show a greater resemblance in identical twins than in non-identical twins, which indicates a shared genetic basis for the trait. This is known as “heritability.” Some diseases have high heritability percentages, such as asthma, which has a heritability of 60%.