ἔχεις μοι εἰπεῖν, ὦ Σώκρατες, ἆρα διδακτὸν ἡ ἀρετή

Can unchosen character traits be considered unvirtuous or blameworthy?

The inimitable Bitchy Jones on forced fem once again:

"The best of these is probably ‘Women wear trousers!’ Because when you’re trying to deconstruct and evaluate what the position in femdom of forced feminisation as a way of diminishing men and what kind of ideas about men and women it reflects and endorses there really is nothing like an irrelevant non-sequitur to stop you in your misguided tracks."

It's got Nine Deuce's acrid tang. The "there's some sort of thing wrong with you. It's not your fault (ND'd blame it on patriarchy, god knows what Bitchy would blame it on, but in any case, it's clearly not an aspect of the will), and it may not even be immoral because it's not hurting anyone. But it's not noble. It demonstrates a character flaw, something corrupted within you. Maybe for souls such as yourself, giving in to such desires is the best decision in a bad situation, but don't pretend like it's a good thing."

I've always felt that such an attitude was decidedly unhelpful. Beating yourself up over desires never seemed to do anyone any good. Much better to accept yourself for who you are, right? Much better to find something liberating in being different from the norm, rather than be paralyzed by it.

Yet I have to own that all of those are utilitarian defenses. If one were to consciously adopt beliefs based on expected return, they might work. Perhaps the subconscious does so, but now that they're arrayed in this fashion, it seems an insult to the truth to leave it at where I'd rather the truth be.

Yet it also seems horridly unfair to condemn a fundamentally unchosen trait. The only coherent morality has always seemed to me to only be concerned with acts of the will. Morality consists of correct action, not correct thought.

The difficulty here may be professing a morality based only on the harm principle while still harboring attachments to other commonly accepted principles of morality (the framework I've been exposed to divides traditional morality into the categories of Harm, Purity, Loyalty, Fairness, and Respect for Authority). Such an attachment to the will makes sense in a heavily consequentialist, utilitarian morality based only on the harm principle, but if you're going to accept purity as any basis of morality, purity of thought seems just as important as purity of actions. In that sense, the difficulty may only be an insufficiently rigorous application of my moral principles to my moral intuitions. I, for example, am repulsed by eating dogs, but I'm also able to overcome my revulsion long enough to realize that my moral intuition in this case is invalid. Perhaps then I need only return to my first principles: clearly no one is being directly harmed by people doing what Bitchy describes, so there's no problem. Describing something as bad but not immoral seems like a cop out: you're trying to have your cake and eat it too by indulging a bad moral intuition while trying to soothe your intellect that knows such condemnation is not justified.

Maybe the force of such a case indicates that I ought to examine my principles. If that's the case, well, it's not something I'll get done in the scope of one post!