Highlighting three points
Some email correspondence recently received suggests that I need to highlight three points that I’ve made on this blog and in my book.
First, in the phrases free choice and free will the term free is not synonymous with unnecessitated, undetermined, or uncaused. When contemporary philosophers debate the compatibility of determinism and freedom, one side doesn’t say that the other side is wrong by definition. Instead, they treat “All necessitated actions are unfree” as a substantive assertion that requires argument. The arguments I’ve seen in defense of it are unpersuasive. You’ll find details in section 3.4 of my book.
Second, you can genuinely want something that you’re necessitated to want by prior conditions. Yes, desires can be manipulated, but necessitation by prior conditions isn’t the same as manipulation. In the typical case, your desires are necessitated by factors that crucially include your psychological makeup and don’t include manipulation. Furthermore, it’s simply confused to think that no desire of yours is genuine unless you chose it.
Third, accepting determinism is no excuse at all for a “Why bother?” attitude. Quite the opposite. If you bother, the result will be determined in part by the fact that you bothered. Determinism doesn’t say you’ll get the same result regardless of whether you bother. The chain of necessitation doesn’t “steer around” your bothering. Why bother? Because determinism guarantees that your bothering makes a difference.
