Among the many properties of existence, stupid, repulsive, absurd, and inescapable (e.g.: Goodhart's Law, Bias Variance dilemma), one stands as the chief: involuntary inheritance of responsibility for choices never made: being held responsible for the flawed actions, degraded environments, and defective genetic endowments passed down from parents, society, and evolutionary predecessors:
Inherited Responsibility
This property consists of four primary components:
- Biological Determinism: Individuals receive genetic material from parents that predetermine a range of cognitive, emotional, and physical traits, including susceptibility to mental illness, impulsivity, and addiction.
- Parental Influence: Parental choices—ranging from diet, abuse, neglect, ideology, and social positioning—affect brain development, emotional resilience, and socioeconomic outcomes.
- Societal Inheritance: The structure of the surrounding society, including laws, values, injustices, and institutions, imposes inherited burdens such as poverty and educational inequality.
- Evolutionary Legacy: The brain and body are designed by millions of years of selection in violent, tribal, dominance-seeking primates. These inherited instincts include aggression, hierarchy, and self-deception.
This conglomerate of non-chosen conditions becomes the foundation on which every human being is expected to build a life and be judged.
Hypothetical Agent’s Suffering
Consider a hypothetical agent—designated as Subject Z—born into a dysfunctional household within a deteriorating urban environment. Z inherits a predisposition for anxiety, poor impulse control, and low dopamine receptor density. Z’s parents are emotionally unstable and economically impoverished. The early childhood of Z is marked by neglect, malnutrition, and inconsistent attachment. Society classifies Z as a failure by adolescence due to poor academic performance and behavioral outbursts.
Subject Z is penalized at each level:
- Biological Punishment: Inability to regulate mood or attention. Cognitive difficulties preclude success in systems requiring delayed gratification or abstract reasoning.
- Familial Punishment: Exposure to trauma results in dysregulated stress responses and hypervigilance, impairing trust and social functioning.
- Social Punishment: Legal systems criminalize Z’s coping mechanisms. Educational and economic systems exclude Z due to behavioral markers coded as personal failure.
- Existential Punishment: Z becomes aware of the futility of escaping these deterministic patterns. Any effort toward improvement is hindered by pre-existing deficits, producing shame and despair.
Z is then expected to take “responsibility” for outcomes rooted in other people’s decisions, shaped by ancestral biology and molded by institutional neglect. This expectation is not just cruel—it is metaphysically grotesque.
Conclusion
Responsibility for the decisions of ancestors, the structures of society, and the blind mechanics of genetics constitutes one of the most degrading features of existence. The expectation that a being should carry the weight of errors it did not commit, solve problems it did not create, and rise above instincts it did not choose, is not noble. It is obscene. The moral architecture that demands this is itself a legacy of the same cruel evolution it condemns.