Being necessitated isn’t being forced
I admit that it can sound wrong when I say, “You chose freely, and you’re responsible for your choice, although you couldn’t have chosen otherwise than you did.” It can be tempting to think that making a free choice requires being magically free from necessitation by prior conditions. But as I’ve said before, your free choices needn’t be magical, and if they were, they would be ultimately unexplainable: at some level, there would be no reason at all why you chose one way rather than another.
Why do many people see determinism as so grave a threat to their freedom that they embrace magic in order to avoid it? I suspect that some fear determinism because they take it to imply things that it doesn’t, such as manipulation and bypassing. Or perhaps they imagine necessitation by prior conditions as a shadowy presence somehow forcing them to perform even the actions they want to perform. Decades ago, the philosopher A. J. Ayer called out this deeply confused thinking, attributing it to
the survival of an animistic conception of causality, in which all causal relationships are modelled on…one person’s exercising authority over another. As a result we tend to form an imaginative picture of an unhappy effect trying vainly to escape from the clutches of an overmastering cause…. And it is because of [this] metaphor…that we come to think that there is an antithesis between causality and freedom. [“Freedom and Necessity,” 1954]
Suppose you choose to do something in these circumstances: You want to do it, your desire to do it isn’t a compulsion or otherwise pathological, and you know what you’re doing. How is your choice unfree just because prior conditions don’t leave you room to be a loose cannon? If you have an answer to that question, please let me know!
