Does Whether X is a Choice Matter to How It Should Be Legally Treated/Addressed?

Hoisted from the draft queue from 3/5/14:

Why does it matter whether or not a controversial potential subject of legislation is a choice or not?  For example, why does it matter whether homosexuality is a choice or not?

Plenty of people who support gay rights make the argument that they should not overly rely on their involuntary nature—that’s an empirical fact, and may change as new information comes to light or even if technology emerges that makes it changeable, rendering the choice to use it or not equivalent to the choice of whether or not to be gay.  What matters is whether or not it’s chosen, on this view, but whether or not it affects/harms others who haven’t chosen to be so affected/harmed.

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But, on the alternate view, whether or not an action is a choice matters because criminal sanctions on inactivity are meant to reduce that activities rate of incidence.  

So if a certain behavior is not a choice, then those who embody/manifest/engage in it will persist in doing so regardless of the penalties they thereby suffer.  In such cases, when the demand for the activity in question is quite inelastic (so to speak), erecting and prosecuting a system of criminal punishment against the activity's participants is pointless and unlikely to result in a change in behavior, and therefore does not justify its cost—either financial, in terms of the resources taken from others devoted to this purpose, or moral, in terms of how the targeted individuals are treated.

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Kant's 'ought implies can' seems relevant here: only if something is a choice do moral issues exist there.

Equality and Democracy and Myth of the Medals

Oberlin radicals' and other student activists' proposing to eliminate grades below Cs, for instance, are perfect examples for Platonists to point to in order to show how some political proposals to promote equality and democracy (which are the same thing, since the political equality of each person would preclude any from having more power than another, a condition with which only equal votes for all--democracy--can be consistent) could hurt/injure the polity:

Allowing the silver and bronze to rise above their stations, including into the ruling gold and thereby undermining the quality of governance, as well as wasting some potential ability in roles it isn't needed.

It's overall a great illustration of what the Ancients and the Founders feared with regard to rule of the mob.  

Conservatives' and Liberals' Moral Psychology

This is an old column but I came across when someone else things to it as part of a response to one of his current columns on ideological diversity.  It discusses how liberals give us to charity than conservatives and the implications of that, in the context of the public policy debate in which Liberals are widely agreed to be more generous public spending/public resources/public funds/the budget to the downtrodden.  

I've read/heard elsewhere that this finding disappears when you control for religion, so it's religion and not conservatism that makes people more charitable, and it's in religion and not liberalism that makes them less so. (check to see if this is in the column, and check to see if it's true)

More recently, it's been discussed some from the unearthing of a 1981 quote from Bernie Sanders that he does not believe in charity.

This might seem to accord with my analysis on liberals and conservatives and their differences on collective action problems: liberals favor coordinated solutions to collection action problems and conservatives don't, in general. 

Maybe this is because liberals overestimate/overprotect free-riding/action of unenlightened self interest, so they don't believe uncoordinated action can solve it, and maybe it's because liberals see themselves and those around them, who are also highly likely to be liberals, free-ride/act of unenlightened self-interest frequently/most of the time, i.e. that liberals free-ride/act on it unenlightened self-interest more than liberals do.

Maybe because they're less generous slash more vicious/less virtuous, or maybe it's because they have a different technical/positive view/belief, i.e. they believe and uncoordinated solution is less likely to happen, and are just taking the rational action rashly taking the action consistent with that belief.

Test both of those 

Maybe liberals just think that they don't have to do it, and it will even get done more efficiently by government.

The pros think they just should not have to do it.

Are they doing it out of defensive free-riding or initial free-riding?

Bleeding Heart Tightwads - NYTimes.com

National vs. State-level Policy, and Deontology

As a general matter, it seems to me that you can't rationally oppose a policy at the federal level for deontological reasons, but support the same policy at the state level.  In other words, you can't argue both that a certain policy unjustifiably violates people's rights when imposed upon an unwilling opponent by the federal government and that the same policy does not violate people's rights when imposed upon an unwilling opponent by a state government.