Free Will I've gotten enough emails about this that I thought I'd publicly address the topic of free will. It's material to my next series of posts, which will be responses to Perry and Dale at Samizdata. My position is that assigning fault to groups for their failures or credit to groups for their successes is a moot point. This is because the fate of groups under controlled circumstances is statistically predictable given their genetics. Individuals, on the other hand, are unpredictable enough that the notion of responsibility is not yet obsolete. (I say "yet" because it is not inconceivable that science might someday predict the future actions of a man given the current chemical state of his body and the conditions of his immediate surroundings.). In any case, while the behavior of an individual may be only somewhat predictable, the fate of groups is far more subject to inference. When a group's fate is predictable along at least some dimensions, their freedom of action decreases in a practical sense. The reduction in degrees of freedom corresponds to an increase in predictability and, eventually, the de facto elimination of free will. After all, free will is only "free" in the sense that it is inherently unpredictable. It is to free agents that we grant credit and condemnation, and if large groups are not truly "free" in the sense of being unpredictable, then such terms are not appropriate.