[simias]

That's insightful, but I also thing the parent argument still works if you use a weaker hypothesis. The way I see it if free will somehow exists it's still relatively limited in scope, at least from what I observe for most human beings (including myself). Our upbringing has a massive influence on who we are and how we think. I'd very much like to believe that I'm a product of my own free will, that I ended up where I am through my own intelligence and the decisions I made but let's face it, had I been born in a poor Ethiopian family I probably wouldn't be talking philosophy on HN because I'm procrastinating on that Perl project.

In particular in right-wing politics I really think that the importance of free-will and self-determination is massively overinflated. We have a ton of evidence that shows that people who are born poor (both economically and culturally) tend to stay that way. Even the most advanced first world societies fail to level the playing field through education and redistribution. Free will is an interesting concept at the individual level but clearly when we consider large societies it's relatively easy to model how humans are likely to behave.

I don't want to derail this discussion to the topic of politics but I want to point out that this conception of the world is why I think socialism makes sense, because I believe that freedom is meaningless if where you're born so heavily influences who you're going to become. Ideally if we were all born perfectly equal in all aspects then your own decisions would be the only things that matter, but we're very, very far from that, therefore I think that we have the moral duty as a society to attempt to correct these inequalities as much as possible. Because all of us right here, had we been born in a Pakistani slum we'd probably be pretty fucking screwed right now, regardless of the existence of free will.