chance and responsibility

This posting is going back to the Borges piece again- I’m sorry that it’s so late getting put up. One point about the story that I thought was really interesting was the idea of how Babylon and our own system hold people responsible for their actions. In Babylon, where one’s life is determined from the beginning by the Company, though completely by chance due to the lottery, is it just to claim that a man who murdered his wife is responsible for the crime because he did it, or better to say that because he simply exists in an unfortunate chain of chance events that culminated with killing his wife it is unjust to punish him? As a result of the predominance and inevitability of chance that forced his hand, one option in this case would be to say that the man is not responsible for the murder because he had no choice. In Babylon, though, Borges makes it clear that people are put to death for this kind of action and even less, and that the people consider it alright, as the death was drawn and foretold in advance by the chance drawn by the Company. It seems like in Babylon there would be no such thing as being held responsible, since everything one does there is determined by the Company, and the allotted chance, and not by one’s own will.
In class, it seemed like this was one of areas that our society was argued to be more just than Babylon, because we think it unfair to hold a man responsible for his actions when the actions are in a way forced by something else, like the Company. If life is hard determined, though, with none of us having a choice as to what chances we draw and what we do, then our justice system does not seem very different at all from that in Babylon. We punish and kill people for their actions, holding them to be responsible, even when on examination it might be proven that they are simply the products of their environment, that if given another set of chances they would not have committed the crime.
I think that if we believe that our system of justice is different than Babylon’s because our actions are not determined by the Company, though, that this still might not help with distinctions of responsibility and justice. It could be the case like Borges mentioned at the end of the story that nothing at all is given, that there is no Company that assigns our lots, and that it doesn't matter because everything is and always has been chance. In this case though, holding others responsible for their actions seems even more arbitrary, since the decisions they make could be based simply by chances over which they have no control at all. At least in Babylon, whatever a person did or did not do as chosen by the lottery, they were rewarded or punished because they were given an unfortunate lot from the Company, and knew beforehand that this was a risk of being in lottery in the first place. Receiving pleasure, pain, or neither, but knowing that it comes from the omnipotent Company at least justifies why these things happen, even if the people are not responsible for them happening. In our system, though, if there is only chance, then what justification do we have for holding others responsible when their actions, sufferings, and joys are not determined by a fair and agreed upon lottery system, but rather by a universe of chance where their actions are beyond their ability to affect at all?