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Originally Posted by asaris
To the contrary, I think we can pretty clearly make a distinction. Consider two men in a locked room. Neither can leave. One man wants to be there, the other does not. Do we really want to say that there's no difference between these two men?
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To make things intresting
The obove illustrates physical bondage. Yet both men retain freedom of their conginitive process.
There are clearly various degrees of freedom. In the extreme, we will not be able to tell the diference between a person who is phisically free and one who is under total physical control. Same goes for the mind. Yet as we step away from total control signs of individual freedom show. It is admited by most that freedom is never total. We are always pushed this way and that. So the question is, how much/or little freedom is requred to say that a person is acting on freewill? Where do we draw the line between freedom and bondage, and can we?
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Originally Posted by 1010011010
So, what then is the essence of a free act?
I'd say it's that you could have acted differently than you did.
It's not, as some posters have suggested, that you do act differently than you did... such a demand is incoherent.
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As far as I know, no one thus far has ever acted differntly then they did. So both requisites are incoherent
