Julian Baggini: 'Free will is a notoriously thorny issue'
No sane person would want the ability to chose anything at all. If you are appalled by needless violence, you want it to be true that you would recoil from torture, not that you would be as free to do it as to not do it. The power to choose just anything is not a freedom worth wanting. The person who believes he could equally well have rejected or accepted a life partner clearly doesn’t have the strength of conviction necessary to make the choice. We want many our choices to flow with a kind of necessity from our beliefs and values.
We cannot change our characters on whim and we would not want it any other way. A Christian does not want the freedom to wake up one day and become a Muslim. A committed family man does not want to find it as easy to run off with the au pair as to stick with his children and their mother. A fan of Shostakovich does not, usually at least, wish she could just decide to prefer Andrew Lloyd-Webber.
The critical point is that these key commitments don’t strike us primarily as choices. You like the things you do because you think they are great. You live with the person you do because you love her. You support a political cause because you think it is just. You don’t choose what you think is great, who you should love, or what is just. To think of these fundamental life commitments as choices is rather peculiar, perhaps a distortion created by the contemporary emphasis on choice as being at the heart of freedom.
/"Freedom Regained" Julian Baggini/