Troy Terwilliger’s Reviews > Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will > Status Update

..then any belief system built on moral superiority, retribution, or entitlement collapses. In its place, the only logically consistent belief system left is one focused on reducing suffering and engineering environments that bring out the best outcomes for everyone, regardless of the hand they were dealt.

Sapolsky uses prenatal and intrauterine environments to dismantle one of our most deeply held illusions: that we begin life as a blank slate. When we think about influences on a person, we usually picture childhood, parenting, or schooling. But he pushes the timeline all the way back to pregnancy, showing how deeply the womb acts as an environmental crucible that shapes the brain before a baby ever takes a breath.

In Sapolsky's framework, both trajectories are the result of an unfathomably complex biological and environmental lottery that began long before either person was born.
When you look at the Harvard graduate and the garbage man through a deterministic lens, you stop attributing their outcomes to mystical internal forces like "pure grit" or "poor choices."

When you strip away free will, traditional praise and blame take a massive hit because the idea of "moral desert"—the notion that someone deserves credit or punishment because they could have done otherwise—collapses.

If a person is brilliant, creative, or deeply kind, Sapolsky would argue they just won a massive lottery: a fortuitous mix of intrauterine environment, prefrontal cortex wiring, supportive upbringing, and stable neurochemistry. They didn't author their own machinery any more than the lilac authored its petals.

Sapolsky’s main thesis is that you cannot find a single moment where a "choice" happens independently of biology or history.