Would you agree that not all people have free will or choice?
Well, in the law of the land, the law recognizes that some people are not morally responsible. So a man might be up for murdering somebody, but the judge will take into consideration whether he was mentally disturbed and deficient, and decide whether he was, in the true sense of the word, responsible for his actions. A little baby that takes some poison that happened to be around and puts it in your tea, doesn't know what he's doing. You couldn't say he's exercising his free choice to poison you. So, yes, the law realizes that some people, in that sense, do not have genuine free choice.
To be faithful in answering your statement, there are a lot of philosophers these days who say, yes, you may have free choice in that there is no compulsion on you from the outside. Here, for example, is a lady, and she's gone down to town. She has an unexpected ten thousand euros to spend, and she's going to find a beautiful dress. And as she goes down, she is determined that this shall be mainly a reddish colour. And her husband doesn't object, and the police don't object; nobody objects. She is perfectly free. There is no outside external constraint, so her choice is absolutely free, in that sense. But there are psychologists and some philosophers who say that, in actual fact, her choice wasn't free. If you could somehow have known all her history from babyhood onwards, and all her memories, and all the emotions in her brain, you could predict she's going to choose a red dress and wouldn't choose, say, green. Well, she's jolly well not free in that sense. Experience and habit, and so on, have made her decision almost certain before it happens.
Is there any truth in that? Well, yes, psychologists will tell us we have a lot of hidden emotions and reasons for doing things that we've long since forgotten. We have developed a lot of habits and likes and dislikes and associations. Is it true that you could normally predict she's liable to choose the red and not the green? If you knew her well, you could say, yes, you might try to predict that. Does that mean that, internally, she's not free? Well, no, you don't believe that, nor would any judge in the land, because if a man in some insurance firm cheated you, and you took him to court, and the man argued, 'But, you see, I've been under such influence from my youth, and I like money, and I couldn't help myself,' you wouldn't accept it, nor would the judge accept it, nor would anybody else. In spite of all our predispositions, we are responsible to exercise choice and, to a great extent, we jolly well can.
I once was at a conference and present at it was a psychiatrist who practised in Bristol. He had a very bright reputation there as a psychiatrist because he got more people cured than did his associates. He told us what his secret was. He said, 'You know, when people are recovering, if they have a tantrum and break the window, I make them pay for it. I start to treat them as being responsible. It is part of their cure.'
When we start regarding people as not responsible for their choices, they are either seriously mentally ill or you're reducing them to the state of a cabbage.
