Believing behavior is fully determined would abolish accountability and self-improvement.

Evidence

If we believed that everything were merely a product of fate or disposition, Cicero reasons, no one would be accountable for anything and therefore there could be no justice. In today’s terms, we’d all just be algorithms. Furthermore, we’d have no reason to try to make ourselves better or different from our natural inclinations. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 268

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School discussions of determinism and incriminating ‘determined subjects,’ and to free-will debates in the reader’s existing library. — connects to: Behaviorism says self-control is just manipulating variables that determine behavior — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1163; Believing behaviour is determined increases actual cheating — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1938; Moral self-sanctions make people accountable for their actions — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 334 (+3 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Behaviorism says self-control is just manipulating variables that determine behavior — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1163; Believing behaviour is determined increases actual cheating — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1938; Moral self-sanctions make people accountable for their actions — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 334 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Believing behaviour is determined increases actual cheating #complicates (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1938
• Behaviorism’s danger is that it could become true, not that it is false #complicates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1217