So we do have free will after all

Freedom to choose our routes into the future.

Are our choices and actions free or causally determined? And if the latter, doesn’t that have serious implications for our personal, social and moral lives?

Determinism in this context is the idea that the effects of everything we think and do are necessitated by preceding causes. But doesn’t this destroy moral responsibility, along with all human hopes and aspirations?

If we have no actual choice in what we do, doesn’t that excuse all anti-social behaviour and undermine completely relations between people? Aren’t, therefore, freedom and determinism incompatible?

Such issues of freedom have long been a vexed issue in philosophical circles, including the question of freedom itself: do we need to be free only in the sense of being free from coercion or compulsion — so that all we really need is voluntariness — or must actions be fully free in order to be morally responsible?

The philosophical notion of ‘metaphysical freedom’ does not accept that life is governed by causal laws, and argues that we do have the power to choose our routes into the future. Under metaphysical idealism, all reality is subjective so free will exists as intentional choice arising from mental processes internal to us; all choices are exclusively subjective.