Reply #10: This Line Of Thinking

[Forrest Greene]

...solid as it is, has always worried me.

If it's a fixed trait, I can just see something like fundamentalist genetics laboratories, as odd an idea as that sounds, working to come up with a vaccine or other treatment. Diabetes is a trait, too, they'll argue, & we have insulin for that.

A bit closer to Earth, does defending the legitimacy of an act by arguing for it as being an inborn trait necessarily imply there's something wrong with simply pursuing that act as a free choice? The inborn argument seems to carry with it a whiff of "Leave me alone, 'cuz I can't help it" which seems counter-productive. I would rather be able to choose my path through the world freely & have my choices, my preferences, be justified sufficiently simply because they were _my_ preferences, the choices of a free individual.

I understand the the argument above, I think, but I wonder if it carries with it this unintentional negative flip side?