Clarke at Boileryard thinks it’s odd that conservatives normally disdain arguments about how social conditions create bad or criminal behavior as absolving bad actors of responsibility, but themselves make those sorts of arguments about various awful regimes in the Middle East. There’s actually a more general tension there: Conservatives tend to be very sensitive to how incentives affect behavior. Welfare benefits create a “culture of dependence,” encourage out-of-wedlock births, and so on. They seem in those cases to be able to reconcile the notion that people are ultimately responsible for what they do with the understanding that what we do—and who we are—are going to be shaped by the incentive structures and behavioral models embedded in social circumstances. Our heads ought to be large enough to contain both these thoughts.