Perhaps you're thinking that frustrating someone's desires harms them or makes them worse off and is, therefore, always objectionable. Even if that were true, many would think that we should care not just about people's welfare but also about how we treat them. For instance, many would claim that we have a duty to respect others and that part of respecting them is treating them as autonomous agents capable of making their own decisions on most matters. But then manipulating the way others form their preferences in ways that bypass their agency fails to treat them as autonomous and so fails to show proper respect for them. So we might think that we should care not just about other people being able to satisfy their preferences but also that their preferences were formed in the right sort of ways.

Indeed, I'm not sure that preference satisfaction, per se, is important, in part because I doubt that preference satisfaction, per se, contributes to anyone's welfare. I don't think that we should be concerned about preference satisfaction independently of the content of the preferences and the conditions under which they were formed. If Jones only desires to collect lint, I'm not sure I have much reason to care about the satisfaction of her desires. Or if Jones only wants to become a hockey player, because she's been brainwashed by the Toronto Maple Leafs to have this desire, then I'm not sure I should be especially concerned to satisfy it. But then someone like me might think that there is actually more reason to be concerned about whether a person's preferences have been properly formed than with whether their preferences have been satisfied or not, or, more accurately, that our reasons to be concerned about whether someone's preferences have been satisfied depend, in part, on the conditions under which they were formed.

Consider this little argument:

A society with laws against killing is a society where true freedom doesn't exist.
A society where true freedom doesn't exist is undesirable.
Therefore, a society with laws against killing is undesirable.

The argument is superficially valid, but it rests on an equivocation. The first premise is plausible if "true" is read as "unlimited" or "unbridled." But if "true" means something like "ideal," then the premise seems false. On the other hand, the second premise is plausible if "true" is read as "ideal," but seems false if "true" simply means "unbridled."

Indeed: if "true freedom" means "unbridled freedom," then most (all?) societies don't have "true freedom." But that's a mere tautology. Using the word "true" here doesn't give us any reason to think that a society with "true" freedom (in effect, a "society" with no laws at all) would be a good thing. It's hard to see what's desirable about a society where goons and thugs can go around offing people with impunity. It's hard to see what would be good about letting such people have their way.

So in short: if we read "true freedom" in one way, no one could disagree with what you say, but that's only because what you say is, as it were, true by definition. But if we read "true freedom" as incorporating a judgment about what's good or desirable, then most people will disagree for the most obvious of reasons: except for the very strong and very ruthless, living in a society like that would be like living in hell. And -- paradoxically or not -- it would be living in a society where meaningful freedom would be minimal for most of us, since so many of us would be at the mercy of the thugs and the goons.

First of all, I'm inclined to say that, if I was to read that in someone's university application, I would rather admire the applicant, not only for their boldness but also for the evidence it would provide that they were the kind of person who just naturally approached things in a philosophical way. I wouldn't actually agree with the sentiment, and I would look forward to exploring it with the candidate in an interview. But, when you're still at the stage of applying to university, you can't be expected to have all the answers already: the important thing is that you're sensitive to the questions.

The concept certainly isn't nonsense: it is an objection that has been raised several times, over the centuries, against philosophers who were committed to rigid theories of pre-determination. For an example, I might quote the late seventeenth century French philosopher, Pierre Bayle -- who was certainly no fool! -- in his critique of Spinoza. Spinoza had argued for a deterministic system in his book, Ethics, which prompted Bayle to write: "A man like Spinoza would sit absolutely still if he reasoned logically. 'If it is possible,' he would say, 'that such a doctrine might be established, the necessity of nature would establish it without my book. If it is not possible, all of my writings would accomplish nothing."'

But what the theory of universal causal determinism means is not simply that the effect has to happen, no matter what, but rather that the effect has to happen because the cause makes it happen. If the cause itself didn't occur -- if Spinoza hadn't written his book, or if you don't put due care and attention into your application -- then the outcome would not arise. It is, of course, true that the theory also entails that the cause must occur, because it was, in its turn, determined by some earlier cause. So perhaps it would make sense for you to hope that prior causes -- say, your genes and your upbringing -- will determine you to take proper care over your application. But the fact that everything is causally determined doesn't mean that we are always in a position to predict what's going to happen, because we don't know all the circumstances or the causal laws that actually determine things. From this position of ignorance, we should just do the best we can. It may be that, unbeknownst to us, that 'best' has been pre-determined not to be very good at all. In your case, I hope otherwise. In response to your specific claim, the inevitability will not ensure your presence regardless of your individual efforts, but it might well ensure your presence because of your individual efforts, and I certainly hope that it does.

From what we know, the answer would seem to be yes. The effects of small events like the one you describe will reverberate through our modern traffic, trade, and communications systems and will have a slight impact on the schedules of many people (probably excepting only those who die shortly after your drive). In many case, this impact will suffice to affect the DNA of future persons, which depends on which one of any man's 20 million functional sperm cells (per ejaculation) will get a role in reproduction.

As time goes on, you can be increasingly confident that, had you not taken your drive, none of the people who is in fact be born would have been born without it. A few years down the road, all newborn human beings, animals, etc., will owe their existence to your little outing. And these beings will be displacing a similar multitude of beings who would have been born then if you had not taken that drive.

I would distinguish the question why you do things you should not do from the question why you do things you do not want to do. Both are interesting, but the first one seems easier to answer. It's just that sometimes you don't want to do what you should do. That may happen for various reasons. Maybe you don't know what you should do or maybe what you should do involves helping other people but you are selfish. And even if you recognise that there is something you should do for your own good you may just not want to do it. I know that I should floss every day, but I don't do it because I don't want to.

The second question is harder to answer. How can you do something you don't want to do? Of course maybe someone is forcing you to do it, but that is not what you have in mind. Nobody is keeping me from flossing, and suppose now that I really do want to floss, because I really do want to take care of my teeth, but still I don't do it. This is weakness of the will. The obvious way to try to explain how this is possible is to say that although I really do want to floss, I also really want not to floss (it's a pain), and my desire not to floss is just stronger than to desire to floss.

So we can explain why we sometimes don't do X even though we want to do X by saying that we also want not to do X, and that want is stronger and so wins out. But if you want to press this line of questioning, you could ask whether there aren't also cases of conflicting desires where we actually do the thing we want less. If so, then we still have a problem seeing how doing what you don't want is possible.

It seems to me that, in order to count as making a choice between multiple options, I must consciously consider these options and I must decide to pursue one of the options rather than the others. My choice is determined, it seems to me, by what, among the options I consider, I most want to do. To this extent, then, I think that your professor is correct. However, I do not think that it follows from this view that, when you daydreamed and left the store after forgetting your intention to buy milk, you chose not to buy milk and therefore that you didn’t really want to buy milk.

In any given instance, I have, as a matter of fact, an indefinite number of options. But unless I am conscious of these options, I can’t be said to have chosen not to pursue them. My dear friend, whom I haven’t seen in ten years, is in the next aisle of the grocery store. If I were to go into that aisle, I would see her and talk to her about old and new times. My talking to her is a real option for me, in the sense that if I choose to go into the next aisle, I would see her and talk to her at length. But since I have no idea that she is there, it would be simply false to say that I chose not to talk to her or that I wanted to talk to her less than I wanted to get home and start dinner.

There are other reasons why I fail to consider options that are as a matter of fact open to me. Some options are so unattractive that it takes no thought to rule them out: they are options that don’t even merit my consideration. Even though I could walk on a bed of nails if I really wanted to, it never happens that I choose not to pursue this option– I don’t even consider it. Because I do not consciously consider this option, I would say that it is simply false that I choose, and keep choosing, not to walk on a bed of nails.

In the case that you imagine, you completely forgot about your need for milk. Because of this absent-mindedness, you didn’t consider buying milk or not buying milk as any of your options, any more than you considered buying a red clown nose or not buying a red clown nose as one of your options. Your not buying milk and your not buying a clown nose are a bit like my not walking on a bed of nails. It’s not that any of these options is so bad– it’s just that in the absence of any awareness of a reason to pursue them, they don’t present themselves to you as options.

The tormented drug addict adds an interesting wrinkle to this whole story because it does seem to be an instance of a case where a person chooses to act– take a drug– even though he doesn’t really want to do so. He’d much prefer to be a good parent and poet than to be a drug addict. Yet he’s compelled, it seems, by his own addiction to act against his own preferences. While this is a natural way to speak of the drug addict, I agree with Gary Watson that we get a bit confused when thinking about this case by a certain ambiguity in the language of wants and preferences ("Free Agency," Journal of Philosophy 62 (1975)). When we speak of what we most want or what we most prefer, we might be talking about desires and their relative strength, or alternatively, we might be talking about our values– our judgments about what sorts of things are most worth pursuing. In the case of the tormented drug addict, he does act on his strongest desire when he takes the drug, and so in one clear sense he does what he most wants to do. However, even as he is acting on his strongest desire, he may not be choosing the course of action that he believes is best, all things considered, and so, in this sense, he may not be doing what he most wants to do.

"Is freedom always better than a lack of freedom?" Well, doesn’t the answer to this question depend on what sort of freedom is at stake and what one might receive in compensation for losing that particular sort of freedom? No human being is free to do anything she might happen to want to do, nor should we be moved to tears by this fact. I am not free to fly like a bird, nor to travel to the Sun. In the US, I am not free to kill openly whomever I want and stay out of jail. Yet even in jail, I retain certain freedoms: to pace my cell, to think about my mother, to count to a million, to rearrange my clothing in my drawers as many times as I like, to talk or not to talk to my cell-mate. Of course, we never hold up a person in jail as a paradigm of freedom, but this is not because we believe that a person in jail has no freedoms, but because we believe that he lacks important freedoms that the rest of us on the outside thankfully possess.

So what makes a particular freedom an important freedom? Why does freedom of expression seem like a more important freedom than freedom to rearrange my clothing in my drawer? Why don’t we think that we should protect a person’s freedom to act on his own conception of a good life, if that conception includes, or even entails, the torment and death of others?

My own view is that one simply can’t answer these questions without appealing to some substantive conception of human well-being and some substantive conception of our obligations to others. Freedom to die of famine, violence, or disease tend not to be valuable at all, since pain, disability, and death do not in themselves make a human life go better and usually make it go much worse, though like other things, these harms might in certain circumstances bring along compensating benefits. Freedom to be raised by a loving parent or guardian, to receive an excellent education, to eat nutritious and delicious food, to form intimate relationships of our own preferences, to spend time and share conversation with our friends, to make sense of the world and our place in it, and to live in beautiful surroundings all constitute valuable freedoms, because the possession of these goods does tend to make a human life go better, though again, in particular circumstances, these goods might bring along evils that outweigh the benefit that they provide.

Better a contented pig than a miserable Socrates, or the reverse, as this issue is sometimes put. We often say that freedom is a good because it allows us to flourish as human beings, while being looked after and safe in the absence of freedom is to be treated more as a thing than an autonomous individual. We do in fact tend to take risks and head off in new directions when it would be safer not to do so, and this might suggest that we do value freedom regardless of its results in terms of human happiness. Whether it is better to go for more freedom and more risk, or less, is something which only an individual can resolve as part of his or her own life decisions, and there seems not to be one answer that would have to cover everyone. But we can make sense of either response here, and that suggests that you are right in suggesting that a preference for freedom over safety is not something that is automatically the right decision ethically.

Thank you very much for your contribution. I'm not a specialist on issues of free will, or on the psychology or neuroscience of addiction. I hope that other panelists will add their comments here as well. However, one thought that comes to mind in response to your question is that there is *a* sense in which drug addicts and alcoholics are in the condition they are in as a result of their own choice: With the exception of those who gained an addiction in utero (I have the impression that this is possible), these individuals made choices that resulted in their addictions. There would have to have been many such choices, since it is only in this way that an addiction can be created; and those choices might not have been made in the awareness that an addiction would likely result. Nevertheless, the housing authority perhaps would suggest that people can be expected to know that certain choices will likely result in an addiction over time.

Of course that will not satisfy you and your colleagues, since you might accept all this and feel that nonetheless, *now*, these addicted individuals hardly have a choice as to whether to continue their addictive behavior, at least in the short run. What is more, they clearly have severe medical problems that justify emergency accommodation. Is it not unjust to deprive them of such services? Furthermore, it will not be hard to find cases of individuals who do qualify for accommodation because of a medical condition that was also due in part to a choice or series of choices that they made at an earlier time : Diabetes due to obesity and lack of exercise, or for that matter a serious injury resulting from some bad driving, are examples. I'm guessing that the housing authority would probably accommodate these individuals. If it would, then that suggests a bit of a double standard.

If there is such a double standard, my guess is that the reason is more political than philosophical: Taxpayers might well chafe at the idea of paying to support addicts, whereas to them it might seem that aut0 accidents and even obesity are to a large extent a fact of life. It is easier for many people to have a "there but for the grace of God walk I" attitude toward someone whose bad driving results in a debilitating accident, than toward an addict. I'm not claiming that that difference of attitude is rational, but there it is.

Given my suspicion that philosophical reasoning is not going to change policy here, how about a practical suggestion: Might your charity approach the housing authority with the suggestion that addicts get accommodation on the condition of being involved in some kind of rehab? (A reminder of the social costs of *not* responding to addiction might also strengthen your case.)

For more information about the science of addiction and recovery, you might wish to consult some of the work of Prof. Bankole Johnson. The link below is to an article about his work. (http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=310).

Nobody thinks that you always want whatever happens to you. I really didn't want to stub my toe earlier today (not even subconsciously), and I think that you can daydream without wanting to. But these are cases where we don't choose. The harder question you are asking is whether there are any cases where we do choose, but what we choose is not what we want. Well, take the reluctant drug user. He chooses the drug because of his addiction, but he also wants not to take the drug. Still, some philosophers say that he must have wanted the drug more than he wanted not to take it. But others say that insofar as what happened was determined by his addiction, it wasn't really a choice but more like the daydreaming case: something that happens to the addict but not something that he chose. And yet others would say that taking the drug was a real choice, but the reluctant addict nevertheless wanted not to take it more than he wanted to take it. Coercion and weakness of the will tie philosophers up in knots.