Whence Freedom
Even if we are not constrained by physical determinism and the possibility of strong freedom is allowed, there are still other challenges to the belief that we truly possess it.
Nature and nurture
It is claimed that any significant choice which we make in life depends not on our free choice but is the inevitable consequence of the person which we have become. Our choices depend on the beliefs, desires and values which we possess but which we ultimately had no choice over.
“In that sense, your choice is not fundamentally free because you could not have become other than the person you are”.
[Baggini 2015,p72]
This even includes choices to cultivate certain values which we desire to have because we believe they are good, either for us or someone else. But where did that desire and belief come from? Sooner or later we track back to something over which we had no choice.
When you think through a decision, on what basis is that decision made? Bruce Hood says this:
“A combination of abilities and dispositions that you were born with and information and thinking skills that you acquired. In other words, a combination of hereditary factors and environment. There is no third place for anything else to come from. You were not responsible for how you emerged from the womb nor for the world you found yourself in. Once you became old enough and sufficiently self-aware to think for yourself, the key determinants in your personality were already set” [Hood 2011, p72] (my italics)
We didn’t choose whether we would be born with the brain of a philanthropist or the brain of a psychopath or anything else. (as far as we know). The sort of person we are is a given, by luck or by grace. Galen Strawson puts it like this:
Whatever the agent-self decides, it decides as it does because of the overall way it is; and this necessary truth returns us to where we started. For once again, it seems that the agent-self must be responsible for being the way it is, in order to be a source of true or ultimate responsibility. But this is impossible, for reasons given: nothing can be causa sui in the required way. Whatever the nature of the agent-self, it is ultimately a matter of luck (or, for those who believe in God, a matter of grace). It may be proposed that the agent-self decides as it does partly or wholly because of the presence of indeterministic occurrences in the decision process. But it is clear that indeterministic occurrences can never be a source of true (moral) responsibility.
Galen Strawson 1998