>>33513176 (OP)
Yes, personality is largely determined by genetics, epigenetics, prenatal hormone exposure, early childhood environment. The way you process stimuli, your temperament, even your proclivity toward empathy or aggression: a lot of that is baked in before you're even aware of having preferences. You're not crazy for seeing people as robots on tracks. We basically are, most of us to an extreme degree.
But that doesn't get you off the hook. And it doesn't make good people "less good" or bad people "less bad." That's a moral sleight of hand. There's no fixed "self" and no ghost in the machine making sovereign choices. What you think of as "you" is just a temporary stack: body, sensation, perception, mental formations, consciousness. Those are the five aggregates, and none of them are you. They're all conditioned. They arise due to causes. You don’t pilot them, you can't control what thought you will have next, all these things ARE you, fleetingly, for a brief moment.
We don't excuse the murderer because he was always fated to murder. We restrain him because the murder still happened and someone suffered. Preventing more suffering matters more than whether someone had agency in a metaphysical sense. You're not culpable in the Western liberal autonomous-individual way but you're still responsible, and still face your moral just-deserts.
And as for God, if they exist, then surely they judge not based on your programming, but on what you do with the constraints you're under. But you're a morally entangled meat puppet. No escape.
