Reflections on Genes, Human Agency, and Moral Accountability
The more science advances, the more convinced I become that the most complicated questions are not scientific, but philosophical.
Science answers the question: How?
Philosophy asks: Why?
And between the two stands ethics, attempting to answer a third question: How should we live?
Perhaps few issues reveal this intersection more clearly than the growing realization that human beings do not begin life as blank pages, as we once imagined. Each of us is born carrying a long history written into every cell of our body—not merely the history of our family, but the history of millions of years of biological evolution.
We are born with genes that determine far more than the color of our eyes or our height. They may also influence how quickly we react emotionally, our susceptibility to anxiety, our response to fear, our degree of impulsivity, and even some aspects of our behavioral tendencies.
And this is where a question begins—one that concerns not only geneticists, but every human being:
If some of our tendencies exist before we are even conscious of them, what makes us morally responsible for our actions?
This question is not about homosexuality alone, nor about violence, addiction, or any particular behavior. It touches the very heart of what it means to be human.
Throughout history, we have tended to regard human beings as possessing complete free will and to hold them accountable for their actions as independent choices. But science has begun to show us that the picture is far more complex.
A person may carry a genetic predisposition toward greater impulsivity, a greater vulnerability to depression, a neurological sensitivity that makes addiction more likely, or psychological tendencies whose existence they never chose.
And here a dangerous intellectual temptation emerges:
If genes influence behavior… do genes become an excuse?
Does science move from explaining behavior to justifying it?
In my view, the answer is no.
Because there is a fundamental difference between explanation and justification.
To understand why something happens does not mean that we have passed a moral judgment on it.
A physician explains a disease, but does not assign it moral value.
A geneticist explains a predisposition, but does not pass judgment on the action.
This is where I found myself reflecting at length on the closing verses of Surat Al-Baqarah—not as a scientific interpretation, for the Qur’an is not a book of biology, but as a text offering a remarkably profound conception of human responsibility:
“Allah does not burden a soul beyond its capacity. It will have the reward of what it has earned, and it will bear the consequence of what it has acquired.”
This verse is often read as a source of reassurance. But I also see in it a remarkably precise philosophical conception of the relationship between capacity and responsibility.
The verse does not begin with accountability. It begins with capacity—as though moral obligation itself is connected to what a human being is capable of bearing.
But what is “capacity”?
Is it merely physical strength?
Or does it include neurological constitution?
Psychological ability?
Innate predispositions?
And circumstances that a person never chose?
I do not claim that the verse explicitly says this.
But it opens the door to the question.
Today, having learned that human beings are not born with equal degrees of sensitivity, impulsivity, or resistance to temptation, the question of “capacity” seems deeper than it did centuries ago.
Then comes the next phrase:
“It will have the reward of what it has earned, and it will bear the consequence of what it has acquired.”
Perhaps the distinction between the two expressions is worth contemplating.
A human being is not held accountable for what he or she was born with, but for what was acquired—as though there were a subtle distinction between what is given and what is acquired.
Between what comes with us into life…
and what we create within our lives.
We do not choose our genes.
We do not choose our parents, our countries, or many of our initial dispositions.
But as time passes, we do choose how we respond to all of them.
Perhaps morality begins precisely here.
The Qur’an then teaches us to pray:
“Our Lord, do not hold us accountable if we forget or make a mistake.”
As though the text itself distinguishes between intention and error, between deliberate choice and human fallibility, and between complete agency and the limits of human nature.
It continues:
“Our Lord, do not burden us with what we have no strength to bear.”
This is a phrase that always makes me pause.
Our very capacity becomes part of the equation of responsibility.
Not all souls are alike.
Not all abilities are alike.
Not all internal struggles are alike.
Perhaps this is why divine justice is deeper than human justice.
The law judges the act.
But God alone knows the extent of the struggle that preceded the act.
I do not believe that science and religion necessarily contradict one another, as we sometimes imagine.
Science says:
“This is the nature of the human being.”
Religion asks:
“And what will you do with that nature?”
Science explains possibilities and predispositions.
Ethics guides choices.
Religion gives those choices meaning.
None of them needs to cancel out the others.
I sometimes fear that we may fall into one of two extremes.
Either we reduce the human being to a biological machine that can do nothing but execute what its genes have programmed…
or we turn the human being into a completely free creature, as though he had never been born with a body, a history, a neurological constitution, or circumstances beyond his control.
The truth, as is so often the case, is more modest—and more complicated.
A human being is neither a prisoner of his genes nor completely free of them.
We live in the space between the two.
And it is precisely within that space that morality is born.
Perhaps, therefore, the real question is not:
Is the human being free?
But rather:
How much freedom does each human being possess within the boundaries of what they were born with?
Perhaps divine justice does not rest upon making human beings equal in their abilities, but upon holding each person accountable within the limits of those abilities.
If so, this opens a new door to understanding moral obligation, mercy, and justice.
Wisdom may lie in recognizing that God did not create us as identical copies, nor did He impose obligations upon us blindly.
He gave each of us our own capacities, and then left us a space within which we could use them to shape who we become.
Perhaps divine justice does not consist in making human beings equal in their abilities, but in holding each person accountable in proportion to the capacity they were given, the awareness they attained, and the freedom they possessed within their particular circumstances.
A judge cannot fully do this, because a judge sees only the act.
But God…
sees the gene, the childhood, the fear, the intention, the resistance, the temptation, and every moment in which a human being struggled against himself.
And that is what makes divine judgment fundamentally different from any form of human justice.
