If I psychologically prime a child to make the choice I prefer them to make such as give them two insignificant variants of the same choice (would you like to go to school now or in a few minutes?) they can feel free, no? Are they not compelled?

When the tiger starts running towards me, I feel a surge of adrenaline that allows me to climb a tree to safety. That may not feel free and yet every day I make choices with less urgency that are still ultimately about survival. I am not choosing to survive I am compelled.

Underneath whatever desire we think we have, how do we know there are no strings? Isn’t the point of a determined universe that there must be strings even if our intuition cannot see them? These desires are not an uncaused cause.

My intuition tells me all desire is manifest from the substrate and is not free ever, though I cannot define free so I have to go with some process of elimination to make that statement. My intuition tells me that we are always on strings due to our inability to fly or teleport but that other people feel free despite these constraints due to their acceptance of the constraints. My intuition tells me that constraints long applied get ignored. If I place a human being in the confines of a cell they will eventually stop testing the limits of that cell and perhaps then they will think they have free will again, intuitively, after some time.

If you want to define free will as any time you can make a decision that aligns with your expectations of what is possible without having to reflect on enfetterment you have not accepted as natural… then ok you have free will at times but it’s a rather absurd distinction to make. It does not seem to give rise to the moral premise the author wants.

By this definition my dresser has freedom to act. I can equally apply this definition to a computer program that controls a thermostat based on tenant law.

Do these objects have free will?

What does voluntary mean? What does free from external coercion mean? Can you define free will without using the word free? Can you define free?

Also your definition doesn’t seem to make sense in a compatibilist view either. Can your decision be both determined and “free” from external influence?

I honestly suspect you can make free will mean whatever you want it to mean if you don’t have to define the word free and you go around thinking about it in the context of how you morally feel about the context in which people were acting.

What does “freedom to act” mean? It sounds like a circular definition and nonsensical. If the universe is determined, you would act as you must act due to causality. What does freedom mean? Is it even meaningful outside of an aesthetic context? I think a feeling, what is perhaps referenced by freedom, is being substituted for an axiom without awareness of this choice.

What does free mean? Why do we need a concept of control in order to blame? I can chuck out a faulty coffee maker and I can morally blame a faulty human, if I am willing to thing of humans as a morality machine.

Every time I read about compatibilism I think of the god of the gaps. Except this latest argument does not even appear to be an argument. It seems to say, despite all evidence correctly pointing to our machine like nature bound by physical laws and our physical form, nevertheless we are free. But it says nothing about what freedom is and why that enables us to blame.

This feels like an ad hominem.