If habits can run without conscious choice, where does responsibility live? This chapter enters the moral territory: the brain can automate behavior, but society still needs accountability.
The story centers on a person whose actions are shaped by forces he doesn’t fully understand, and a legal system that must decide what to do with that fact. The book doesn’t offer a comforting answer. It shows the tension: explanation is not the same as excuse.
The argument lands on a boundary. We can’t choose the cues that shaped our past, but we can learn to recognize them. Once a person becomes aware of a pattern and has tools to change it, responsibility returns.
Freedom, here, is not the absence of habit. It is the ability to rewrite a habit when it harms others—and to accept the consequences when you refuse.