Whence Freedom

It is claimed that any significant choice which we make in life is fully determined by the person which we have become. Our choices depend on the beliefs, desires and values which we possess but which we 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?

“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]

We didn’t choose to be born with the brain of a philanthropist or the brain of a psychopath. (as far as we know).

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 : Free will

If genuine, rather than just the appearance of, freedom exists then it’s origin must be from a “third place” and it must be beyond the material. If we believe that the Universe is nothing but material then we must believe that we are not free. If we believe we have any freedom at all, then we must believe that the is something beyond the physical even if we are unable to probe this source.

Nevertheless many people, maybe the majority in the West, believe that a belief in determinism is compatible with a belief in freedom.