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...

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.

Your question raises a number of interesting issues, but I will here just ask one brief question in return. If we were more victims of our environment than of our genes, could we then truly be held culpable for our misdeeds?

In your scenario, the soul caused an event, but nothing caused the soul. But presumably the cause of the event is some configuration of the soul, perhaps a decision it made. Well was this decision caused or not? If it was caused, then there still doesn't seem to be any free will in the frame; and if that configuration of the soul was uncaused -- just came out of the blue -- then that seems random and again not compatible with free will.

It is difficult to see why a zombie couldn't do all the behavioural things we do, and indeed just as efficiently and effectively as we do. But that wouldn't show that consciousness could not arise through evolution, since it might be that we do what we do with the help of consciousness. But maybe consciousness doesn't even help us do what we do: it's just a by-product of the way we do what we do. But even in this case, it might arise through an evolutionary process, just like the lub-dub sound of a beating heart. But suppose now that consciousness does play a causal role in the way we do what we do. Is there any reason why the specific consciousness of ourselves as a free agents might arise through natural selection? Well (and here I am just speculating) maybe a creature that feels in control tends to do better in the world, and that feeling of control leads naturally to an idea of free will, even if it turns out that the idea is ultimately incoherent. This takes us back to the by-product...

It is very difficult to see how free will is possible. The problem your second view raises looks like the problem of determinism. If everything that happens in the world, including all human actions, are determined the laws of nature, then it is indeed difficult to see how we can have free will. Now maybe the laws of nature do not completely fix every event, but only the probabilities of various events occurring. Indeed this is the standard understanding of quantum mechanics, which you mention. But even this 'slack', this element of indeterminism, does not seem to leave any room for free will. If my body just happens to go one way rather than another by chance, that is not me acting by my own free will, since I am not in control. The first view you mention is rather different. This is the thought that we have no free will if God knows everything we will do. In my view, this idea of foreknowledge is less of a threat to free will than determination by law. For even if someone knows exactly...

Since philosophers disagree about what free will is, this is not a straightforward question to answer. But one attractive idea, due to Harry Frankfurt, is that free will requires that an animal have 'second order desires'. First order desires are desires concerning things, like food or a good book; second order desires are desires concerning desires, like the desire to desire to go to the opera, or the desire not to desire cigarettes. The idea is that having free will has to do with having a certain harmony between first order and second order desires: the animal wants to want what it wants. So if this is along the right lines, then only animals capable of these sophisticated second order desires can have free will. And maybe only humans are animals like that: other animals have first order desires, but maybe not second order desires.

At the most general level, it is difficult to see how free will is even logically possible, whether determinism is true or not. For if determinism is true, then everything we do follows from the laws of nature plus the state of the universe before we were born; and if determinism is not true, then there is a random element to what happens. Neither of these possibilities seems to leave room for free will. That was the bad news. The good news is that the fact that our actions have external causes is entirely compatible with their also having internal causes, in the form of our beliefs and desires. My consumption of the banana split was caused in part by the presence of that item on the menu -- an external cause -- but also by a desire on my part. If I had not had that desire, or if my desire to lose weight had been stronger, I would not have eaten the banana split. So insofar as the existence of internal causes is enough for us to hold someone responsible (as we often suppose it to be), then...

Even if determinism is incompatible with free will, a claim of hard determinism might be false or misleading. It is false if the world is in fact indeterministic. It is misleading if determinism is true, but free will would be impossible even if it weren't. That is, it may be that our ordinary concept of free will is like the concept of a round square, a concept of something that could not possibly exist. If so, it is misleading to put the blame on determinism.

I'm with you: I don't see how indeterminacy helps with free will. That's what makes free will such a tough nut: we seem to lose either way. If everything is determined, then it looks like we don't have free will, because we could not have done otherwise that what we do. If not everything is determined, then this might mean that some of our actions have a random element, but then these actions hardly seem ours: they certainly don't seem to involve any more free will than under determinism. It's heads or tails; if it's heads, we lose; if it's tails, we lose; so we just lose.