Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

Sometimes we are proud of our freedom: we are not mere creatures of instinct and desire. We can pull ourselves together and fight to control our obsessions or addictions. We deserve praise when we succeed. If we fail, we may deserve and sometimes receive punishment. Freedom brings responsibility, and people who abuse it deserve blame and punishment. But nobody deserves punishment for failing to do something if they could not do it. It would be most unjust to punish me for not having gone to the Moon, or to punish a man in prison for not keeping an appointment outside the prison, for example. Here the obstacles are beyond the agent’s control. That means, he or she is not to blame. So our moral reactions as well as our ordinary thinking seem to presuppose that sometimes, even if we acted badly, we could have done otherwise. But might this consciousness of freedom be an illusion? Could we ever really have acted otherwise than we did?