Here’s the main problem for scholarship dealing with free will—it’s outrageously messy. For a moment, imagine how many people had to come together just for you to be here. You’re sitting (presumably) there reading this. Maybe you’re at the office, maybe you’re sitting in your lounge chair or maybe you’re at the coffee shop. Try to calculate how many people had to come together—biologically, to pro-create—for you to be here, wherever you are as you read this…. You have your folks, their folks, and their folks. Beyond that, we start getting fuzzy. And, why not—who in normal life keeps track of family beyond three or four generations? It becomes not just fuzzy but actually hazy after our great-grandparents. Regardless, every one of them had to make decisions for you to be reading this now, to exist at all. All those decisions by all those people. How many corners turned or not? How many decisions made or not? Was the act of coming together rational or purely passionate? Or, some mixture of each? How much gumption was there? Did he ask her to the dance, or did he freeze at the moment? Most likely, the former if you’re reading this. Did she drop her handkerchief on purpose, or was it purely accidental?

My very Hayekian take on life.  Over at The Imaginative Conservative.