First, I don't think it matters for the answer to your question whether the omniscient God is or is not the creator of the beings whose conduct He foresees. Thus suppose the rats are created not by God but by some fairy. God observes the rats and, knowing of each whether it is smart or dumb, foresees whether it will end up rewarded or punished. Can this new wrinkle in the story -- that the rats are created by some fairy rather than by God -- possibly make a difference to whether the rats have free will or not? I cannot see a reason for believing this. (To be sure, the wrinkle makes a difference to God's responsibility: if He creates dumb rats Himself, then he is actively responsible for the suffering they predictably undergo in the punishment zone. If He's merely an onlooker, then He is at most passively responsible insofar as He could but fails to protect the dumb rats from pain.) Second, I don't understand why there should be felt a tension between foreseeability by others and free will. The...

What's outside the agent's control is, I think, somewhat narrower than what you call "perceptions or cognition." Suppose new DNA evidence reveals that a black man on death row is actually innocent. And suppose the jurors who declared him guilty say that they couldn't help seeing him as guilty when he was brought before them. I think we should be most reluctant to accept this excuse. Perhaps they could not have avoided a certain negative emotional rection to the accused (given the racism of their society and upbringing). But perceiving a person as guilty (of some crime) involves a good bit of judgment on the basis of testimony and other evidence. And here we can examine whether the jurors weighed the evidence carefully, deliberated thoroughly, and so on. As a juror one is not bound to let one's emotional reactions prevail. One can, and one ought to, try one's utmost to put these reactions aside and to judge the case on the basis of the evidence alone. Now let's look at the narrower question whether...

Procrastination and weakness of the will (as when people continue to smoke and to eat a lot of red meat even while they understand the health risks and want to lead a long healthy life) are obvious problems for the view you are entertaining. Another problem is moral and altruistic conduct. You are kind to a stranger, or generous to a rival, at some cost to yourself -- are you acting in your own (perceived) best interest? Not in any ordinary sense. Agents themselves will often deny that they decided on the basis of what was in their own best interest: "Here I tried to act in his best interest, not my own." Now you can simply always overrule such agents. You might say that an agent's conscious conduct necessarily is conclusive evidence that she must be taking herself to have some interest that she takes this conduct to promote -- perhaps an interest in being regarded (by others or at least by herself) to be kind or generous, or a strong interest in smoking, eating red meat, or procrastinating....

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.

By emphasizing human freedom and responsibility, existentialists are not asserting a claim in physics -- such as "it is false that human beings are mechanisms fully determined pursuant to physical laws of nature." Rather existentialists are making two different points. One is phenomenological. We are condemned to be free or forced to decide. You must decide whether to enlist in the army, whether to pull the trigger, and so on. Physical determinism, even if you could somehow know that it's true, could not take away this predicament of being forced to choose. The other is a normative point about how we ought to think about our decisions and agency. I ought to take full responsibility for the effects of my decisions. And when there is the slightest doubt about the reach of these effects, I ought to assume that this reach is greater rather than smaller. Existentialists urge this point retrospectively: I ought not to deflect responsibility by thinking/saying that things just happened ("I could...

Skill level is under one's control to some extent: one can become more skilled -- in juggling, say -- through practice. One has less control over how far one can improve one's skill, and how fast; that's more a matter of inborn endowments (dexterity), upbringing, environment. Hard work, as you say, is similar. One has a lot of control over how hard one works, but much less over the limits of one's capacity for hard work, though these limits can normally be expanded with practice. One's inclination toward hard work, similarly to the limits of one's capacity for hard work and limits to the skill level one can reach, is under one's control only to a small extent. How does all this bear on the proposed norm that one should compensate for a lack of skill with hard work? Not much, I think. For even if one's inclination to, and the limit of one's capacity for, hard work were rigidly fixed, one could still compensate by working hard up to one's limit even if this goes against one's inclination. That...