Are We Responsible for a Character We Did Not Choose?

We did not choose our genetic endowment, childhood environment or earliest learned responses, yet people are regularly judged as selfish, cowardly or hot-tempered. If character was not designed from scratch by the person who has it, where can responsibility begin?

In Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that repeatedly performing a kind of voluntary action produces the corresponding character. We are therefore at least partly responsible for the people we become. His point is not that character can be reset at will, but that actions both express and shape it. Modern debates about moral luck place a sharper limit on this claim. Thomas Nagel's idea of constitutive luck draws attention to the way genes, carers, peers and environments help form our dispositions, even though we largely do not control those starting conditions.

Imagine someone who acquired an impatient reflex in a chaotic household and, as an adult, repeatedly interrupts colleagues in meetings. It would be unfair to treat the original formation of that reflex as entirely their fault. Responsibility increases, however, once they can see the harm and have genuine opportunities to pause, apologise or seek help, but persistently refuse to adjust.

My judgement is that responsibility for character is neither all nor nothing. We should distinguish the source of a disposition, its expression in particular actions, and a person's later opportunities to maintain or revise it. Greater awareness and a more realistic range of choices support greater responsibility; prolonged deprivation, trauma or lack of support may reduce it. This avoids moralising a starting point created by fortune without turning “that is just who I am” into a permanent exemption.

https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.3.iii.html
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-luck/