It’s Useful to Feel You Could Have Done Things Differently, Even if It’s a Fiction

You can’t escape cause and effect, but there is a way of viewing human agency that is motivating, plausible and humane.

We feel that we are free, the originators of our own choices, not just conduits through which the chain of cause and effect flows. But think about it a little more and thi...

The ‘compatibilist’ conception of free will acknowledges the causal necessity of the physical world, but it also recognises that, if no one ‘made me do it’, I acted freely.

To act free of causes would be to act without reason. Such a freedom would be gratuitous, since the only grounds for our choice would be the power to choose itself.

To accept that one has done wrong and take responsibility for it is to resolve to try not to do it again and to put right anything that went wrong. We evidently do have the capacity to do this, and that is all that matters.

We would have no moral character if we did not strongly feel that there were things we simply could not do, and others we felt we must.

Even quantum physics and the randomness of quantum causation cannot offer us an escape because the ability to act randomly is not the same as having free will.

 A lot of the time, you might feel as though you have freedom to act as you wish (a view known as ‘voluntarism’), but taking into account your history, personality, mood and other factors, there is in fact an inevitability to everything you do.