ok maybe forced is a little strong. but i wouldn’t consider it a free and voluntary decision either.
one decision in life leads to another, and another and another, and one day you wake up ina very far and distant location from where you might have thought you’d be… and you didn’t really decide to go there. does a guy “freely” buy diapers? yes, in the sense that he buys the diapers, no in the sense that if he has a baby at home, he’s gotta go buy the diapers.
is buying the diapers a free and voluntary act? maybe, as no one is forcing him to drag his sorry tired ass to the market, but in another very real sense, society, and especially our past decisions, kind of box us in such that decisions feel less and less free as we proceed deeper and deeper into the quagmire of life…each individual decision might individually seem to be a free decision, but after a while, you have no choice.
If the result of the hoices was not foreseeable to you at the time, and past choices necessitate chocies you’d otherwise rather not make, it sometimes feels like free will is being drained from you. call it compromise, call it reality, call it life in the real world…but free will is a bit strong..
yes, a pawn in a much larger game. Our genetic programming, our social brainwashing, everyone in america likes to believe in free will, choices, responsibility…
if only it were that simple…
i agree, the loan doc signer willfully picked up the pen and signed the documents, but there were a ot of external forces acting on him. it wasn’t a completely free act. No free action is truly possible. People cannot choose to be what they want. they are what they are and many of their decisions are out of their hands…
am i a victim of the genetic drive of women to reproduce? no, not really. i don’t think that simply declining to say it was all free will necessarily makes one a “victim”.
it can be not your choice and you can still not be a victim.
Consider the animal kigdom–bad things happen, random things happen, it’s not really a hoice, there are no “victims”, there are just clearly bigger things at work than the individual decisionmaking processes of each animal out there.
is an ant a “victim” of an anteater? No. Might the ant have made some bad decisions that resulted in his demise? perhaps..
claiming the title of “victim” implies that you are owed something — restitution, pity, respect…something. Simply recognizing that we are not completely autonomous, that our decisions, our thoughts are not entirely our own, that we are not really at the helm of the ship setting forth on the sea of our own individual destiny, doesn’t necessarily mean any of us are victims because of that.
I’m not a victim. but I’m not completely the captain of the ship that is my self, either. I’d say I’m somewhat higher ranked than Cabin Boy. Maybe First Mate?
i’m just a small creature trying to maneuver a complex maze. is a rat in a giant maze making “free” decisions as he winds his way through the various choices available to him? Yes. Each choice is “free. But, really, No — come on, he’s a rat in a maze. How can you consider each of those choices there to be completely free when the range of choice is so limited and predictable?
We are all rats in a maze.
If it were all entirely up to me, i’d have been too scared to reproduce at all…so clearly, this wasn’t all my free will…
