Topics Freedom

Question Do we always make the choice we want to in a given situation? My professor said that for better or for worse, we always make the choice that we wanted to make in a given situation. My professor gave the example that a drug user decides to use again because he decided he wanted to, irrespective of whether the choice is detrimental to his health or not, it was his choice. I argued with another example that a person who decides to walk to the store to buy milk does so by choice. But, if he begins to daydream about a final exam he needs to study for and then he forgets why he was going to the store, did he make the choice to not buy milk? Would you say that he made the choice to daydream about his exam? How does one get out of this conundrum?

Accepted:
November 13, 2006

Comments

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.

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 if I choose to go into the next aisle, I would see her and talk to her at length. But since I have no idea that she is there, it would be simply false to say that I chose not to talk to her or that I wanted to talk to her less than I wanted to get home and start dinner.

There are other reasons why I fail to consider options that are as a matter of fact open to me. Some options are so unattractive that it takes no thought to rule them out: they are options that don’t even merit my consideration. Even though I could walk on a bed of nails if I really wanted to, it never happens that I choose not to pursue this option– I don’t even consider it. Because I do not consciously consider this option, I would say that it is simply false that I choose, and keep choosing, not to walk on a bed of nails.

In the case that you imagine, you completely forgot about your need for milk. Because of this absent-mindedness, you didn’t consider buying milk or not buying milk as any of your options, any more than you considered buying a red clown nose or not buying a red clown nose as one of your options. Your not buying milk and your not buying a clown nose are a bit like my not walking on a bed of nails. It’s not that any of these options is so bad– it’s just that in the absence of any awareness of a reason to pursue them, they don’t present themselves to you as options.

The tormented drug addict adds an interesting wrinkle to this whole story because it does seem to be an instance of a case where a person chooses to act– take a drug– even though he doesn’t really want to do so. He’d much prefer to be a good parent and poet than to be a drug addict. Yet he’s compelled, it seems, by his own addiction to act against his own preferences. While this is a natural way to speak of the drug addict, I agree with Gary Watson that we get a bit confused when thinking about this case by a certain ambiguity in the language of wants and preferences ("Free Agency," Journal of Philosophy 62 (1975)). When we speak of what we most want or what we most prefer, we might be talking about desires and their relative strength, or alternatively, we might be talking about our values– our judgments about what sorts of things are most worth pursuing. In the case of the tormented drug addict, he does act on his strongest desire when he takes the drug, and so in one clear sense he does what he most wants to do. However, even as he is acting on his strongest desire, he may not be choosing the course of action that he believes is best, all things considered, and so, in this sense, he may not be doing what he most wants to do.