ABSTRACT
Along with the many practical ethical problems posed by the U.S. Human Genome Project, a recent National Institutes of Health report of the Working Group on Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues indicates an interest in research on the project's philosophical implications for the concept of human responsibility and the issue of free will versus determinism.1 The idea that behavioral tendencies (for example, criminal tendencies) might be linked to genetic endowment reliably enough to allow them a place in a map of the human genome raises the specter of control by external forces. At least one popular reply is that the sorts of results the project is likely to come up with, like current results linking personality traits such as shyness to genetic endowment, leave room for environmental influence.2 But this question, familiar in the social sciences, of "nature versus nurture" seems to be beside the point: genes in conjunction with environmental factors pose the same threat to individual autonomy where the individual lacks the requisite sort of control over his environment, even supposing that his parents and other members of society might have been able to control his environment for him. Whether his behavior is causally determined depends on whether theirs is-as it may be even if it is not genetically determined.
