A large number of philosophers believe that one may affirm both determinism and freedom of the will. Probably at least half the panel does, though I do not. I suggest that a person does an act freely if she does the act and has the power to do otherwise (all other things remaining the same). And if determinism is true (determinism is, roughly, the idea that every event is necessary given antecedent and simultaneous events and the laws of nature) then persons lack the power to do any act other than the act they do. In any case, for most philosophers who affirm that we are free, we rarely think that freedom is without any context or absolute. In other words, if you are free, you are free to do some specific act or adopt some particular practice, and so on. You righly note the influence of family and other factors in shaping our thinking and action as adults. And even now, as adults, we may be under the influence of all sorts of forces and conditions. Nonetheless when you do reflect freely about (to...

Excellent question. It is excellent partly because it goes to the heart of the nature of freedom: freedom makes little sense without a context. So, it makes sense to ask of a person at any time whether she or he is free to do X, but in the case you are imagining there is no will of the child prior to the parent's decision making. So, we do not have a case of when, say, a two year old child is given some character-transforming infusion, we are rather focussing in on the very gestation and emergence of the child. I suggest that there might be reasons to discourage this kind of engineering (perhaps such engineering might tend to make parents feel they have a kind of ownership over their children), but that such engineering need not be seen as an imposition of the parents' will "onto the will of the child" with one proviso. That condition concerns whether the child has any freedom once she reaches maturity to be (for example) not optimistic, not competitive, to neglect her intellectual talents, to be non...