responsibility, innate goodness, and influences

Someone's opinion of who bears the Burden of Responsibility is a telling indicator of his or her outlook on life. When a person's moral Quality is deficient and therefore leads to deplorable actions, who should receive the ultimate blame? Should it be the person, or the way the person was nurtured? Should it be the person, or the irresistible compulsions within that person? Should it be the person, or the horrible situation thrust onto that person such that he or she had no other practical course? If more moderately apportioning blame in pieces, then where should the greatest piece of blame be placed? In short, is the person performing the action obligated or not to take responsibility, because of the influences that affect that person?

Clearly, Christianity and many other common belief systems that believe in divine judgment strongly lean toward the personal responsibility camp. (Divine mercy is also important, but the need for mercy emphasizes rather than minimizes the gravity of the judgment.) Maintaining the concept of ultimate personal responsibility is less common for secular belief systems that don't strictly believe in the objective existence of Good with a capital G or Judgment with a capital J. Secular belief systems have a deeper difficulty, too, which stems from not believing in the mere possibility of transcendent human identity, consciousness, and decisions. If humans are nothing more than materials, fundamentally speaking, then "making choices" is no more than a class of physical phenomena. Separating out "human choice" from the influences on that choice is as futile in the secular point of view as attempting to separate out the path of a terrestrial projectile from the influence of the world's gravity! Thus, the inherent difficulty of obtaining the necessary data and theories is the only barrier to creating a "moral calculus" that can compute what someone's decisions will be from the state of the matter that makes up him or her. The decision's influences are the decision.

Given that a completely secular point of view leads to that conclusion, then it's also apparent that the secular point of view has no basis for the notion of "innate" universal human morality. When a self-admitted, completely secular person tries to assert that people are "basically good", his or her perspective constrains that assertion to really mean any of several possibilities:

• People are basically good because people are basically raised to be good, perhaps through a process of "society evolution" in which societies that don't instill "basic goodness" self-destruct or are crowded out by prosperous societies that do. This is the "nurture" way to believe in secular basic goodness.
  
• People are basically good because of the usual genetic evolution. That is, people whose genes don't include "basic goodness" self-destruct (not producing offspring) or are crowded out by people whose genes do. This is the "nature" way to believe in secular basic goodness.
• People are basically good because over time, as people mature, they discover that "basic goodness" is the most economic, cost-effective way to achieve their desires when interacting with others. This is the "economic" or "game theory" way to believe in secular basic goodness.

Those possibilities are by no means self-evidently true or supported by most of the actual historical evidence of humanity. Someone who wants to exclude supernatural reality but still believe people are "inherently good" is ignorant, misinformed, or deluded (I'm not too hesitant to apply those terms when they don't hesitate to apply those terms to me). As pieces of matter, people can only be neutral, or be good in the same fashion that rocks or bears can be good. The question of what characterizes a "blank slate" tabula rasa person is close to meaningless in a secular context. In the Christian context, the innate soul of a person mirrors God's capabilities of rationality and morality, is always free to choose regardless of material influences, but is prone to an evil elevation of itself.