Does choice actually exist?

Question

Here's an example to illustrate what I mean:

Let's say I have a 'choice' between options A and B, and I pick A. Was that really my choice? Something or multiple things caused me to pick A. What if I chose those things? Well, something caused me to pick the cause that caused me to pick A. And so on. Whenever we come back to a choice, there's always something before it that caused it to happen. My point is, I was never going to pick B. It was impossible for me to pick B because something caused me to pick A. And under different circumstances, if something caused me to pick B, it would be impossible for me to pick A, meaning I never really had a choice. I was always going to pick B, and that was predetermined.

Answer 1

You are confusing free will with a random will, a very common thing.

The question is , IS this a true good I am reaching out to, or is it false? and that is all.

You do not have the choice of making some random hateful thing the object of your will. But you do have the choice of choosing a lesser or greater good and of avoiding evil.

Do you realize that you are arguing for an uncaused choice as a free choice??

Answer 2

Hi Adrian - You've summed up pretty well the determinist view. This version is a natural consequence of physicalism - the view that everything, including us, is just physical stuff.

But not everyone is a physicalist. Dualists like Descartes think we are both a physical body and an immaterial mind / soul. In that case the chain breaks: whatever happened up until I made the decision to do A is made irrelevant by my choosing / willing action A rather than action B.

There are huge problems with that idea, though. How does an immaterial soul not be in a state caused by previous states, the way everything material is? And anyway, how if it's immaterial does it CAUSE material objects to do one thing rather than another?

Note that there are people who believe in free will, and people who don't (because of determinism), AND people ("compatibilists") who think free will is (in some sense) compatible with determinism. You'll have to look that bit up ...

This is very complicated stuff: literally thousands of books have been written trying to make sense of it!

Richard