&gt;A)Are people free, independent actors<p>Your existence is dependent on ancestral inheritance (instincts, emotions, genetics  etc) and your identity is dependent upon the relative social interactions with others. We are naturally, subconsciously affected by the way others in our environment act. Our minds are a codependent network, affected by all of the thoughts and actions of those who came before us.<p>You are currently using a language that you did not independently invent, for example, and so many of your thoughts are constrained to the limitations of that language.<p>&gt;B) or are they merely cogs in some vast social machine, constrainted to operate in their private lives and businesses according to the arbitrary dictates of some self-appointed group of sermonizing moralists?<p>There are many subconscious social constraints, much of which evolved to enable the survival of the species, but it is possible to break free of them, especially when those constraints end up being contrary to survival.