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...

"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?...

I agree that the idea of being held responsible for our emotions ispuzzling. It seems that in order to be responsible for X, it has tohave been up to me whether to X. Actions seem to be good candidates forresponsibility, since they seem to be something over which I havecontrol– when someone annoys me, I can choose whether to utter somecaustic remark or instead bite my tongue. But what about my feelingannoyed in the first place– do I have any choice about that? And ifnot, then can I really be held responsible for this emotional reaction? Aristotle is very helpful on this point. While it is true that on theparticular occasion on which you feel the emotion, you can’t help butfeel it, you are nonetheless responsible for your emotion since youwere responsible for becoming the sort of person who feels this sort ofemotion. Being susceptible to bad emotional responses (i.e., having a badcharacter) is, on Aristotle’s view, like being sick. "For neither does a sick person recover his health [simply by...

On what grounds should we say that freedom is an illusion?