"The cause-effect sequences in our brains are just as determining, just as inescapable, as anywhere else in Nature"
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Lamont isn’t merely defending determinism here; he’s yanking it out of the abstract and stapling it to the one place people most want to keep “special”: the mind. The line works because it treats the brain with the same blunt continuity we grant to rivers, weather systems, or falling stones. No carve-out for inner life, no sanctuary for a metaphysical self that can step outside causation and veto the chain. The phrasing “just as determining, just as inescapable” is doing rhetorical heavy lifting: it’s not a calm claim, it’s a closing argument, anticipating the listener’s last refuge - “surely not me.”
The subtext is a moral and political wager. Lamont, a leading American humanist, wanted a secular ethics that didn’t rely on souls, divine commands, or cosmic loopholes. If the brain is nature, then responsibility has to be rebuilt on different foundations: not “could have done otherwise” in some supernatural sense, but how motives, environments, education, trauma, incentives, and institutions shape action. Determinism becomes less a permission slip for cynicism than a demand for better social engineering - prevention over punishment, compassion over metaphysical blame.
Context matters: mid-century philosophy and science were steadily naturalizing the human person, while Cold War-era anxieties made “human nature” a battleground. Lamont’s insistence reads like a rebuttal to both religious libertarianism and romantic individualism. It’s a line designed to puncture pride, but also to relocate human dignity: not in exemption from nature, but in understanding it well enough to live sanely within it.
The subtext is a moral and political wager. Lamont, a leading American humanist, wanted a secular ethics that didn’t rely on souls, divine commands, or cosmic loopholes. If the brain is nature, then responsibility has to be rebuilt on different foundations: not “could have done otherwise” in some supernatural sense, but how motives, environments, education, trauma, incentives, and institutions shape action. Determinism becomes less a permission slip for cynicism than a demand for better social engineering - prevention over punishment, compassion over metaphysical blame.
Context matters: mid-century philosophy and science were steadily naturalizing the human person, while Cold War-era anxieties made “human nature” a battleground. Lamont’s insistence reads like a rebuttal to both religious libertarianism and romantic individualism. It’s a line designed to puncture pride, but also to relocate human dignity: not in exemption from nature, but in understanding it well enough to live sanely within it.
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| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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