Free Will

[Mudhammam]

Yeah, we would still try to rehabilitate people and keep those who pose an imminent threat away from society, but it would make no sense to moralize, to say to the convicted murderer or rapist: "You had the genuine possibility of doing otherwise but you choose not to," which, if such in fact is not the case, seems repugnant to my conception of human dignity. That's what separates us from beasts: we can reason against the passions; we can demarcate right and wrong and choose to do the former in spite of whatever proclivities draw us towards the latter. We function with a deeply imbedded sense of latitude to make decisions independent of any prior circumstances that have led up to that point. It seems to me that's what the philosophic virtues are largely about: living in accordance to a set of principles regardless of the situations that we find ourselves in. To commit to such ideals seems to me to be a choice that I am freely able to make at any given moment.

I'm also just not so sure that I'm persuaded of the idea that science, which deals exclusively with the physical world, is capable of answering such questions as whether or not the physical world is all that exists (and much of experience, if we include imagination and intellection, hardly seems remotely physical), and if it is not, then we might have to arrive at certain (that's an intentional double entendre) conclusions through other means - which is what we are always doing in exercising pure reason, anyway, and possibly free will, if it can survive.