We are limited by what we CAN do

I may wish to choose to do or to have or to be many things. I can’t fly. I can’t live in a different time. I can’t change other people (much).

We are limited by our desires

Anyone who doesn’t know this hasn’t read enough history or enough fiction. People are limited by the values in which they’ve been raised. People are limited by the values that are groomed into them by their community.

If you go into a store you can predict why some items are more costly than others. We have this thing called “fashion” which is community desire shaping.

Our wills are hardly “free” if we understand “freedom” to mean “we may chose anything”.

Idealized Lives

If you listen carefully to someone you can piece together what they imagine to be an idealized life. It is often a collage assembled from the advertising they have been bombarded with for years. It’s the look, the car, the clothing, the house, the friends, the lovers, the body, the admiration, etc.

Travel to a different culture or to a different time through books or movies and you’ll see how variable all of this is.

Psychology and Sociology

Psychology and sociology are fun because they often study why we make the choices we do and arrange our communities as we do. Psychologists and sociologist and the rest of us who are capable of generalization make semi accurate predictions about the decisions of other. When we know someone well we can sometimes “mind-read” them, anticipating an answer. We all do this and have capacities for this.

If we are the subject of such mind-reading will we still imagine that somehow our predictable decisions are “completely free”?

Real Moral Agents

What we have, instead is real agency. We can choose, usually within the limitations of what is possible for us and desirable to us, and our decisions are consequential and real. We could have chosen other things from the options on the menu but we did not.

Sometimes choices bring us to very different places. Sometimes all our choices don’t lead us anywhere unusual.