jewishblues

I tend to find debates about free will or fate to be a bit silly, because in all my life I have never heard of a single person who excused the actions of another person by attributing their acts to fate. Whether we believe that people are free to choose to their actions or not, we treat them like they are. Of course, nobody ever seems to speak about good actions as being fated. It only seems to be when things go wrong that we need to attribute some motive or agency to a person. As I watched an episode of The Man in the High Castle yesterday, I thought about this when one of the characters said that he didn't have a choice. My instinctive reaction was, but of course he had a choice. He always had a choice. Even now he has a choice. His choices are mostly bad ones, and he'd probably prefer not to make them, but they are still there, and they are still his. And I'm sure all of us have encountered something like that before, or been responsible for it. I'm sure we've all at some point comforted ourselves by saying that we had no choice or it was out of our control. I reject this thinking. We always have choices, and we can't escape from them, no matter how much we'd like to.