The thing about human limitations

Lately I have found myself arguing so much the point that human actions are in some sense constrained by what the actor wants to do (rather than what he consciously reasons he ought to do) that I have started to annoy myself.

I felt like Mark Kingwell was talking directly to me with this bit from his book Better Living:

We may be constrained by our physical, genetic and other natural limits, but we are not altogether defined by them. We therefore cannot accept too easily the notion that whatever is, is right—even if vouchsafed by psychological or physiological theory. Within any natural box of limitations there is much freedom to choose, both individually and socially. That includes, significantly, the idea so important to us, that the most interesting thing about natural limitations is that we can sometimes find the ability to pass beyond them.

It is a profitless reduction of ourselves to crude biological creatures. We are biological, we are animals—but that is not all that we are.