A Rhetorical Analysis Of Matt Ridley's Free Will

In this well-thought, extensive piece by Matt Ridley, Free Will starts off humorously with the demonstration of free will and takes us through the factors that influence it. “Society, culture and nurture.” Ridley says, are the factors and elaborates to the full extent of life as to do we have free will or not. Defending his claim that free will can be obtained against the host of critics and their sources, he analyzes and contradicts through his extensive knowledge, strong examples, and his own host of supporting credible people to shield his claim; his rhetorical strategies strongly support and defend his claim. To support the very first claim that he steps on to about the influences of free will, Ridley says, “ Everyone’s fate is determined

Ridley talks about facts and uses logic in regard of divorce rates in twins and criminal records of adoptees in Denmark. Closely observing that divorce rates in twins are partly supported by genetic variation and partly by non-shared environmental factors, it was concluded that, “You are no more likely to divorce if reared in a broken home than the average.” This shows that non-shared environment-- home and parents-- do not affect the person’s choices, characters or personalities but it is rather the environment consisting of peers along with genes that play a role. Similarly adoptees that have a criminal record usually diminish once adopted in a neighbourhood and going to school with non-criminal backgrounds and good morals even if biological and adopting parents have a criminal background. These two examples show strong reasons to support Ridley’s

This endless circle observed by Ridley shows how free will is hard to be truly expressed as either we are being responsible or are expressing the determinisms of what we are responsible for. Ridley goes on to say how critics use Hume’s Fork to see it as a way to predict human behaviour and how once the mathematical factor be put in place. Ridley’s claim: “Human behaviour is unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.” is supported by French mathematician and physicist, Pierre-Simon de LaPlace. LaPlace talks about the Chaos theory that rests on chance and luck in predictions, “Theory holds that even if you know all the determining factors in a system, you may not be able to predict the course it will take, because of the way different causes can interact with each other.”, which acts as a shield in defense of Ridley’s claim of human behaviour unpredictability inferring that even if all genetic determinisms and determinisms caused by society and culture be taken into play, human behaviour cannot be