Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior—but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control.

The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior.

Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism.

It may be true that strict punishment—rather than mere containment or rehabilitation—is necessary to prevent certain crimes. But punishing people purely for pragmatic reasons would be very different from the approach that we currently take.

The more we understand the human mind in causal terms, the harder it becomes to draw a distinction between cases like 4 and 5.

Degrees of guilt can still be judged by reference to the facts of a case: the

What we condemn most in another person is the conscious intention to do harm.

Where change is impossible, or unresponsive to demands, we can chart some other course. In improving ourselves and society, we are working directly with the forces of nature,

We need only acknowledge that efforts matter and that people can change.