Who's Responsible?

As a dabbler in philosophy, I have spent some time pondering a question that has plagued philosophers for millennia.  Namely, what is the nature of free will?  This is usually addressed in the context of a religious or counter-religious argument revolving around the compatibility of predestination, divine pre-knowledge, and our ability to make choices both simple and profound.  This is a fascinating conversation, but not one that I am interested in indulging at the moment.  I am more concerned with the role of free will in a social context.  This question can be tailored so as to apply to every aspect of society.  For example, let's look at socio-economic classes (I hope that's the "vogue" terminology right now).

It  seems to be an American tradition to believe in social (upward) mobility, that anyone with work ethic can "pull themselves up from their bootstraps" (I don't know what bootstraps are) and achieve a good life regardless of one's birth, or one's parents' station.  This is an optimistic and comforting notion, that many of the upper class citizens became such through personal achievement and hard work, and that the poor deserve our pity only to the extent that we pity their laziness and wasted opportunity.  Sounds harsh, I know, but I at least agree that, if true, this system is preferable to one in which the poor are such because of circumstances beyond their control.  That would be unjust.  In the interest of full disclosure, I am employed full time and make well below the national median income.

I will now steer the conversation toward the philosophically interesting part, but I would first like to acknowledge that there does seem to be a growing trend of rejecting this notion of unfettered social mobility in the media.  And that is another fascinating conversation that I would love to pursue with you, but not in this post.  So, if a person is born with a severe mental or physical handicap which prevents them from participating in the workforce, no reasonable person would fault them for not achieving.  If a person is born to a junkie mother in an abusive home, but seems to be more or less physically whole, maybe some of us decide that such a person does not get the same "pass" as the handicapped person does.  If a person is born into a "normal" family environment, but has emotionally distant parents or suffers mild psychological abuse, probably more of us are going to take the stance that such a person can be expected to thrive in our society if they so choose.  And finally, if a person is born without any identifiable disadvantages, probably most of us are going to expect them to succeed in society (provided they want to).

The point in all this is that we as a society have a very wide-ranging set of beliefs on where the threshold of environmental factors in social achievement ends, and therefore where personal responsibility begins.  And drawing that line arbitrarily somewhere between severe physical/mental handicap at birth and a "perfect" childhood seems, well, rather arbitrary.  Perhaps we are looking at the problem the wrong way.  Maybe "work ethic" and "laziness" are not characteristics that we can take personal credit for.  Maybe they are as much a part of our environmental circumstances as genetic disease and abusive, neglectful parents.  I know, I know, this sounds like some socialist drivel to some of you, but consider this:
If you view hard work as a personal achievement that you can take credit for, then likely you would consider yourself a hard worker, at least to some extent.  If so, then you and I have something in common.  I consider myself to be a hard worker.  If I were forced one day to label complete strangers as either "lazy" or "hardworking" based on the extremely incomplete information set yielded by my passing observation, I would certainly encounter folks that I would label as "lazy".  So I certainly don't deny the existence of lazy people, but rather I wonder if they choose to be lazy, or put differently, if they would prefer to be hardworking.

Here is my reasoning.  If I am correct in evaluating myself as being relatively hardworking, then I am certainly glad that I am not lazy.  In fact, I wouldn't mind being an even harder worker.  Now the limiting factor on my laziness is stress.  I don't want to spend most of my time working so that I can afford an apartment and a car that enable me to spend most of my time working.  But the stress of being homeless or without transportation or without food would be so taxing that it is simply easier for me to spend most of my time working in a dead-end job.  In fact I show up early every day in order to avoid the stress of constantly cutting it close.  That's just the way I am wired.  So if a person is free from those stresses, what precisely is their motive to work hard?  I don't endorse a lazy lifestyle, but I sure as hell don't endorse my lifestyle either.  Freeloading or being exploited? Seems like a "lesser of two evils" kinda thing to me.

Anyway, I'll wrap this up.  I wonder if our work ethic is outside our control, and if it is, doesn't that dramatically change the way we look at society, success, poverty, and fairness?  For an interesting tie-in, here's a podcast about a similar way of looking at criminal guilt.