"The result of choice, not circumstance."

There seems to be this popular belief that admitting you are influenced by your environment is a sign of weakness. I just gave a presentation for my ethics class was on why the "trolley problem" is a logical fallacy. My argument was that you could create a system to flip the switch that completely circumvented the individual as a moral agent. For example, you could create a system whereby the individuals on the track could bid ebay-style on which direction the switch should be flipped. Or, alternatively, you could create a system whereby the direction of the switch was determined by a dice, with a 5/6 chance of the single individual being killed and a 1/6 chance of the other five individuals being killed. I then argued that A) social systems, not only individuals, should be considered to be moral agents and B) the morality of a system should be judged based on the behaviors it promotes via its extrinsic rewards. So, for example, the ebay-style system would be a universe that encouraged its inhabitants to create things of value for others so that they could bid their way out their predicament, whereas the dice-toss universe would be completely amoral as it would neither encourage nor discourage any set of behaviors. To me the lesson of the Milgram experiments, the Asch conformity tests, the Stanford Prison Experiment, etc. is that moral decisions are the result of both the individual's intrinsic nature and their external environment (inc. extrinsic rewards). So the trolley problem has always struck me as a false dichotomy because it assumes that the only two options are for a single individual to flip the switch either left or right, which implies that morality is completely intrinsic within the individual and the external environment plays no role, even though this is completely counter to what social psych teaches us.

Anyway, this was sort of a very long was of saying that I like the idea that people should consciously choose their environment because they realize that their environment does have a very real effect on their actions.

I agree. I think pg's essay is spot-on. However, I don't believe that choosing where you live is as simple as saying, e.g., "I want to be an academic" and thus you move to Cambridge.

What if, say, your spouse is really into acting and loves the Los Angeles area... it might be very hard for them to find the same happiness in Cambridge, just as you might be harder-pressed to be as academic as you want to be in L.A.

I think a fair question is, if, for whatever reason, you can't move to an area that would well-support your ambitions, what can you do to improve your environment? Surely the best answer isn't "nothing, just resign yourself to live your life in obscurity and failure"...