A common experience writing on the internet is mulling over an idea in your head, putting down a sketch of your thoughts, checking your RSS feed, and finding that someone has done your idea better than you could have. Steve Randy Waldman pulled one of those on me this morning. He also read Ryan Avent and Matt Yglesias back-to-back, and had very nearly the same thoughts that I did about their theses, but more detailed and smarter. I looked for some grafs to expropriate, but really you should read the whole thing.
This post is dedicated to Mark Bedau , my philosophy professor at Reed, a great guy and a wonderful teacher, by far the least pretentious philosopher I've ever met. He is responsible for this post only insofar as he sparked my interest in the subject; its many shortcomings are mine alone. Who's ready for some unqualified philosophical rambling? I'm not going to do much more than summarize, as this is probably one of the five biggest problems in philosophy and the material quickly gets out of hand. Anyway—let's start with some terms, appropriately hefty philosophical ones. (I'm going to steal shamelessly from Wikipedia, as the free will article is very good.) Free will is "purported ability of agents to make choices free from constraints." Some call it the "ability to have done otherwise," but that definition runs into problems which I'll describe later. Determinism is the view that all events are caused by previous events, while indet...
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