Bump

That doesn't disprove free will, it merely means there are influences that improve the chances of someone behaving a certain way.

Your brain evolved over millions of years to motivate you to behave a certain way to control your temperature, to ingest nutrients, to reproduce and so on. However the human brain has some ability to curb these impulses based on its abstract knowledge, like avoiding eating an entire tub of ice cream, for example.

>>18290565
The influences you mention aren’t mere probabilistic nudges—they’re the complete causal chain that determines behavior. Evolution shaped male brains with higher average testosterone, greater aggression propensity, and risk-taking traits due to sexual selection pressures over millennia; socialization reinforces this via norms encouraging male dominance and violence as status markers. These factors don’t just “improve chances”—they fully explain why, given identical circumstances, males are vastly more likely to snap into mass violence.
Your example of curbing ice cream impulses? That “ability” is itself determined: by prior learning (health knowledge from education/parents), prefrontal cortex development (genetic + environmental), current blood sugar, stress hormones, etc. No transcendent “you” overrides causes—the decision emerges unavoidably from the brain state.
If libertarian free will existed (uncaused choice), we’d expect far more variance defying these patterns—women committing mass shootings at rates untethered to biology/culture. But the 98% male stat fits determinism perfectly: outcomes rigidly track causal influences, not agent magic. Compatibilism redefines “free will” as absence of coercion, but that’s not the robust libertarian version needed to escape predictive patterns.

External forces (like society, malnutrition, low intelligence, location, physical constraints, etc.) can limit someone's choices, and make it exceedingly difficult for them to choose one thing over another, so that only those with great virtue, vice, skill, incompetence, luck, or misfortune will be able to avoid taking a certain path. Virtue, skill and/or luck to avoid bad paths, vice, incompetence, and/or misfortune to avoid good ones.

Likewise, freedom is not absolute, freedom requires one to be in possession of one's faculites, and more potent external factors can wrest this posession from us, in whole or in part. Factors such as drugs, physical traumma, emotional traumma, sufficiently extreme emtional distress in the moment, etc. can all limit or even temporarily eliminate freedom. In such cases, one's freedom to resist is reduced or elimianted, and so a given path becomes near garunteed, though with little to no culpability on the side of the agent in question.

As such, even granting libertarian free will, there can be a certain inclining of probabilties here or there; due to external factors limiting or constraining one's options or evne the power of freedom itself.

>>18291757

So if society as a whole is just fundementally failing young men over and over again. If we are failing them in their moral and practical education, failing to properly encourage them, or failing to give them an actual fair shot (so that any encouragement and moral education just looks like lies and hypocrisy to them, giving it the opposite of the intended effect) or if we are failing to protect them from discouraging and morally and practically corrisve forces, etc. if we are acting in such a way as to severely limit the horizons of young men, so that it requries more and more virtue, skill, luck on their side (and they have less and less aid in acquring and maintaing such virtue and skill; and more and more impetus to develop vice and fall into incompetence) to avoid a monstrous pathway; then it's ultimately left up to chance for them to avoid it, and with less and less skill and virtue due to our fault, and more and more vice and incompeetence, the eventual monstrous acts become more or less ineviible; and in progressivley larger numbers for as long as the problem is not adequately addressed.