Nature versus nurture doesn't matter because we shape our own destiny

The argument

The nature versus nurture argument ignores that we are active in shaping our lives. Assuming that identity depends on our genes or our environment doesn't take our agency and volition into account — both sides of the traditional dispute treat a person as the place where causes arrive rather than as one of the causes. The clearest evidence for that omission is the way environments are acquired. Although our environments shape who we are to a certain extent, it is we who seek out these specific environments: a person chooses their friends, their occupations and their habits, and those choices then go on to shape them in turn. An influence somebody selected cannot be counted as something that merely happened to them, so a portion of what gets attributed to nurture is really agency operating at one remove. There is a debate in psychology that seeks to determine how much of our development we control and how much of it is a result of things that just happen to us. Despite the lack of consensus, we are beings with free wills. By recognizing that we are active beings who shape our lives and thereby ourselves, we realize that nature and nurture are merely tangential influences on who we are — conditions we work with rather than the authors of the result. The practical case is that treating people this way changes outcomes. There is even a well-known therapy called logotherapy based around the fact that people determine exactly who they are despite any genetic and environmental influences. This therapy has been found to be empowering and reduce emotional suffering by teaching that we are more than victims of our environment and circumstances — which suggests the agency it appeals to is real enough to be relied on in practice.

Context

People are a summation of their habits, temperaments, and experiences. However, where do these things that define us come from? Psychology has long been debating whether they stem from our genes or our environment. Settling the debate will expand our currently limited understanding of human development.

Premises

Counter-arguments

This argument fails to recognize that the choices we make that shape our lives are dependent upon our genes and our environment. It is from those that our free will stems. For example, people may exercise their agency by being very social. This is part of their life and thus part of their development – they are products of their past sociality, along with many other things in their life. However, their sociality comes from some combination of genetic and environmental influences. They may be genetically predisposed to have a social temperament. They may have been raised in a social family. Or perhaps some environmental trigger (i.e. a person or experience) inspired them to become more social. Their sociality must have some cause, be it internal (i.e. genetic) or external (i.e. environmental). Free will does not exist to the degree that this argument assumes. We have free will, which we exercise by making choices. But what choices we make are determined by our genes and our environment.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise misdescribes what the debate claims. Research on nature and nurture asks about the sources of variation between people; almost none of it denies that people act, and most contemporary accounts treat agency as something that develops out of temperament and circumstance rather than as an alternative to them. [Rejecting P2] The example concedes the point. Seeking out an environment is itself a disposition requiring explanation — a sociable person selects sociable settings, and the sociability came from somewhere, whether temperament, upbringing or a formative encounter. The premise places the choosing self outside the causal account without saying where it came from. [Rejecting P3] Logotherapy's finding is that people can locate meaning within their circumstances and that doing so reduces distress — a claim about therapeutic benefit, not evidence that genes and environment are merely tangential. The conclusion also overshoots the premises: even a strong reading of agency would make us products of nature, nurture *and* choice, rather than of neither.