Freedom, Agency, and the Ubiquity of Compulsion

Alex LoPrinzi
The College of New Jersey Department of Philosophy
April 27, 2019

Introduction

Many scientists now believe that persons are merely dust. Members of Homo sapiens are,

in other words, cosmic dust spewed out from exploding stars—supernovae—which traces back

to the Big Bang nearly fourteen billion years ago. They believe that in the early formation of the

Earth, during the Period of Heavy Bombardment, a chemical reaction occurred on Earth’s

relatively warm oceans and, suddenly, some unicellular organism—most likely a bacterium of a

sort—sprang into existence. Around eight or nine billion years of biological evolution take place,

with life becoming more complex—evolving limbs and organs and brains, and so on—and then,

about three-hundred thousand years ago, here we are! What an origin story! This is either deeply

unsettling, or astonishingly majestic, depending on one’s point of view. I myself take the latter

approach. But some intriguing questions come flooding in, such as “Is life especially rare across

the universe?” and “What is the meaning of it all?” and “What makes Homo sapiens any freer

than bacteria, or lions, or mice?” In this essay, I will explore the latter question, namely, the

question of freedom and whether we have it, and whether it is compatible with either human

nature and our psychological constitution, or luck in the broadest sense of the term.

I will argue that the sort of control we take ourselves to have—the control of, or over, our

actions and choices—is currently being remised by modern science. Nature is now rightfully

ceding the control we thought we had. Further, I will argue that compulsion is not restricted to
cases of overt manipulation, but that it permeates human society. Freedom, then, cannot be, by

any stretch of the imagination, anything more than the superficial ability to do what one wants,

unimpeded. Metaphysical freedom, as it were, is in a sense unattainable in this universe. I will

briefly explain some reasons why I think these erroneous beliefs are so pervasive, and will,

finally, add to the wider issue of freedom with some remarks on a possible (unsatisfying)

solution.

Control and its Evil Twin

I take it that many thinkers regard control to be an essential component of freedom. To be

free, it is claimed, is to be able to choose, to act, to wish, and to value, and that these

determinations be controlled by the agent. A will that is “free” in this sense requires that the

agent whose “will” it is be free to act as she herself determines—to control her actions in accord

with her motives, values, reasons, wishes, and so on. A robot would not claim to be free if it

discovered that it had not been determining its own actions, but rather the algorithms and

programs that the humans so fortunately encoded into it. The robot, like the bacterium, would

still have a set of values and goals, and would, upon whatever sort of reflection it has, endorse

them as its own. Persons, on this view, would then be no different than bacteria, or robots. All

three agents have volitions that are consistent with what, or whom, they want to be. This sort of

meta-awareness—the retroactive reflection on oneself as an effective agent in the world, as a

source of consequences toward others—is severely lacking in a bacterium, presumably, but I see

no reason to impute persons with an exalted order of freedom, given that all life is playing by the

same rules, so to speak. Bacteria, including persons, are free to act as determined by prior

reasons and goals, but are they free to choose which reasons occur to them? It is a live possibility
that the universe gave them such motives, but it is not an open question whether persons, or

robots, form their “wills” of their own making—from the inside, as it were—which is what I

believe many who hold this view assume is the sort of freedom persons have.

Thus, there are a few problems with squaring freedom with one’s internal constitution,

or at least what one would recognize, upon reflection, to be part of oneself (and I’ll return to this

shortly). Another interpretation is that freedom is incompatible with external control—the sort of

control that contravenes one’s moral character. To be free is to be free from compulsion,

manipulation, neural dysfunction, subliminal influence, genetic heritage, and so forth. On this

view, freedom can be prized apart from those actions which emanate from heteronomous

factors—that is, factors which did not originate in the agent, but rather whose source was

external to her. A person is free only if she is not compelled to act contrary to her prior motives

and values. The issue gets thorny when we consider cases of compulsion that would not

ordinarily be thought as such. Compulsion does not necessarily entail explicit, gun-to-your-head

coercion. Nor does it require another agent. Extreme poverty can act as compulsion, as can

severe depression, obsessive compulsive disorder (naturally!), and even genetic predisposition to

aggression, say. Of course, there are degrees of compulsion, and, in such cases, there may well

be an objective prior probability of performing any given action that lies anywhere on a scale

from 0 to 1. Thus, it is unclear to what extent freedom remains amidst all the compounding

subtle sources of compulsion that nudge one’s actions and motives in a particular direction or the

other.

(In this vein, I can imagine a mugger threatening my life in the middle of an alley,

demanding: “give me your wallet, or else there is a 49 percent chance that I will kill you!” In this

case, do I have a net sum of 1 percent freedom? What if the likelihood that the mugger will kill
me is 30 percent? Am I free to not give this mugger my wallet—to do otherwise, to use the

reviled phrase? Let us suppose that what is in my wallet is only slightly less valuable than what I

take to be the value of my life. Certainly, anything over a 50 percent degree of compulsion will

involve a much riskier gamble, and an economist or a utilitarian would suggest that I give the

mugger the wallet. But it is near undeniable that the degree of compulsion is somewhat

correlated to my being able to do otherwise, and that once the likelihood of my inability to

refrain from doing otherwise increases, or indeed reaches 50 percent, my sense of freedom

vanishes. The imagined scenario involves an overt case of compulsion by an agent, to aid the

imagination a bit, but it applies to many other cases, especially those without an agent—

including genetic predisposition, brain impairment, economic or societal pressure, and so forth.

Many traits and personal characteristics have a heritability of more than 50 percent, so that one’s

conduct and physiological constitution is ineluctably formed prior to rational thought, or else,

once environmental factors are added to the mix, such a moral character hardens beyond the grip

of self-determination. Thus, these cases also apply to those in which one’s life is not threatened.

Indeed, in these cases the lack of freedom runs even deeper than in the initial coercion case, for it

is not that I can recognize these “compulsions” as not who I am, but that they covertly form the

very fabric of my moral character.)

Compulsive Behavior and Connecting the Causal Dots

Nonetheless, it is natural to suppose that control plays at least some role in guiding

intuitions about an person’s freedom to act and choose as he does, and that the motivational

source of such actions and decisions plays a similar role. The menacing problem of luck—the
bane of freedom and all its presumptuousness—is better understood in this context. I would

hardly be an apt candidate for blame or punishment for what was “out of my control,” so to

speak. No one blames me for a severe tornado, or for heavy traffic in the morning rush hour

(although I am least minimally responsible for the latter). Imagine a man who enters a sandcastle

competition. Suppose, to raise the stakes, that the prize is $1 million. The man has epilepsy, and,

just before the end of the assigned building period, he has a violent seizure that destroys several

elaborate sandcastles. We might attempt to find someone who is blameworthy—whoever was in

charge of admissions, perhaps—but we could hardly blame the epileptic man himself for the set

of consequences that issued from the seizure. If the man did not in fact have epilepsy, but rather

kicked the sandcastles with malicious intent, to the same effect, we would then have prima facie

justification to blame him for the consequences which he himself endorsed (no, intended). The

intuition, naturally, is to blame him for the sort of person he is, and the concomitant malice he

intends to impose on others. But one’s ignorance of the relevant facts surrounding the malicious

sandcastle-kicker’s decision to so act, and the fact that we might have been on the receiving end

of such an act, leads one to feel a palpable resentment in this man’s presence that is almost

irrevocable, given the default veil of ignorance behind which we judge others’ actions and moral

values. The semblance of retribution boils in one’s blood. But take any serial murderer, or even

an ordinary person who commits a minor act of wrongdoing. If you had her set of genes, her

childhood experiences, her psychological constitution, and so on—you would be her. Or, if we

removed the genetics from the equation, we would still have a strikingly similar person, and I

presume that in both cases they will have committed the same act, or will have faced comparable

degrees of compulsion. There is nothing different in her that is separable from her experience

and her genetic code, and that determines, contrary to her better nature, what she will in fact do.
No, her “better nature” is merely that which she does not regret, and the kind of person she is—

whose immoral conduct does not evince in her a sense of shame and regret—is the kind of

person whose childhood, genetics, psychology (and so on) sculpted her values in such a way that

she could have chosen (or wanted) otherwise. Persons are but moving targets of blame and

praise—some easier targets than others—but nature doles out the criteria for deciding who is

blamed and who is praised, with the assumption of control and agency that turns out to be

unwarranted, once the relevant facts are unveiled.

The problem truly sets in once again when, as mentioned above, one considers those

cases which do not constitute acts of overt compulsion, but which exempt one from blame, once

one realizes that the control generally assumed to be had evaporates. Seizures are but one

example. Neurological disorders of the brain are another. The circle of control is shrinking with

the growing knowledge of human behavior, and of the various influences which distort

judgement and decision-making. The sort of scientific experiments that are relevant here simply

unseat the presumption of control—the locus of freedom and agency—and reveal, bit by bit, the

sheer totality of compulsion. Compulsion is everywhere, and it is easy to deny this fact upon

looking inward, as it were. We might say, “surely I am not compelled by anything, however

subtle and covert. Even if I were, I would be obliged to overcome it for the greater good.” It is a

fascinating question whether, when humanity comes to be nearly omniscient about human

psychology, genetics and the biology of behavior, attitudes will change about persons who have

committed atrocious acts of violence, but who have nonetheless inherited a natural predisposition

to such behavior. Is our ignorance with respect to such questions a suitable place for our

“freedom?”
 Even if I grant that some philosophers’ highly technical accounts of freedom and moral

responsibility are true, and if we rule out such cases of overt compulsion—like neural

dysfunction, physical and mental illness, extreme poverty, and the rest—that might leave, I’m

convinced, only two to four percent of the human population who is truly free and morally

responsible. They seem to add more exemptions each time scientists learn more about the brain,

or human psychology, or what have you. At any rate, if there are such free persons, freedom

would be inversely proportional to compulsion, and I suspect that compulsion is much more

common than one would like to believe. And I myself am inclined to believe that, when every

nook and cranny of our ignorance is filled, as it were, there will be no place left for one to

squeeze their freedom, for the sort of freedom assumed to be on offer is indeed a chimera.

A Brief Interlude on the Self and Dualist Misperceptions

I think many of us, implicitly if not explicitly, are Cartesian dualists. That is, we assume

there is a little homunculus, a director of the show, hiding in our heads and generating all our

thoughts, beliefs, motives, and reasons. We assume, erroneously, that there is an enduring self,

somewhere to be found in our brains, perhaps, and someone to whom the name me applies. This

thing we take ourselves to be may have a unique set of dispositions, attitudes, preferences,

wishes, genes, experiences, memories, and so on, but if you strip all these things away, you’re

still left with me, or my bare-naked metaphysical self. Many people—ordinary folk and

metaphysicians, included—may not believe themselves to be essentially souls or spirits, but they

do cling to the delusion that there is something in them, or about them, that each calls his or her

self. There is something it’s like to be me, they’d say, simply in virtue of being me!
 The fact remains that social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and the modular

model of the mind more generally, seem to squeeze out whatever sort of control and rational

agency we thought we had and relocate it to the whims of nature. There are several experiments

in psychology, for example, that demonstrate that subjects tend to misattribute arousal—whether

the arousal originates in a short bout of exercise or a fearful task—for feelings of attraction.1

Male subjects crossed an unstable suspension bridge overhanging a canyon—thus evincing a

fear-based arousal—and were then approached by a female confederate. The control group had

undergone the same procedure, but these subjects crossed a low stable bridge—so there was no

arousal. The experimental group tended to be more attracted to the female target; it is believed

theorized that the males misattributed the fear arousal for a feeling of attraction.2 Thus, the more

one’s heart rate is elevated, the more attracted one will be to a potential mate.

We like to think that we determine whether or not we feel attracted to another person, not

the uncontrollable fact of our elevated heart rate, but that is not the case. Several psychologists

write an introductory story elucidating the point:

Meyer stands at one end of a 450-ft suspension bridge located in a British Columbian park. The bridge is

made of wooden planks attached to wire cables and spans a deep canyon. Like many who visit the park,

Meyer decides to test his nerve by crossing the narrow bridge…When Meyer looks up again, he notices an

attractive woman. Under different circumstances, Meyer might have been only moderately attracted to her,

but in his aroused state he is strongly attracted to her. He introduces himself to her and later asks for her

phone number. They date, fall in love, and eventually marry. Research suggests that if Meyer had been

crossing a lower, wooden bridge instead of the suspension bridge, he would have been less attracted to the

woman.”3

My intuition about what persons tend to think of as their self is merely the object of their

consciousness. What I am, in this moment, are the things of which I am conscious, or attentive.
Whatever I think, those thoughts—and the one who is assumed to be generating them— that’s

me! The one who seems to be doing the thinking is the one who is imputed to be the thinker.

But—funny story—there is no thinker. It is just a body and a brain, with a web of sensations and

thought thoughts that flow in and out of consciousness from environmental stimuli like cars in

the Holland tunnel. Thoughts merely occur to the mind, and because some person experiences

them phenomenologically—from the inside, as it were—that person self-identifies with the

thoughts she thinks are hers in a deep could-not-possibly-be-otherwise sense. (This is the

ultimate source of resentment, indignation, shame, anger, hatred, and so on The realization that

thoughts think themselves peels away the force of these negative emotions, given that the person

who experiences them realizes that they have no essential content. They are empty—devoid of

meaning until one imbues them with it—and, as such, negate the toxic self-identification with

thought and emotion.)

But I digress. The point is that subtle forces in the environment—perceptual and

affective stimuli of which we are habitually unaware—alter human perception and thus render

silly the view that human agency exists in any robust manner. There is something in the very

idea of freedom that assumes a certain degree of rationality—a sort of cognitive stoicism, if you

will—that is, unfortunately, no longer on the table, as far as modern psychology is concerned.

More Information and the Basket of Control

Persons, as highly complex intelligent mammals, live in an illusory bubble of selfhood or,

more specifically, self-identification with thought and feeling and desire. The self-identification

is causally linked to the ubiquity of retribution, or desert, or the condition of deserving some
attribution of blame or praise, punishment or reward. The evolutionary heritage of humanity has

made it near impossible to recognize that there are quite possibly necessary and sufficient causes

of wrongdoing which can be causally connected (and adequately explained) without reference to

the agent her/himself. There is, to use Parfit’s phrase, a complete description of the relevant facts

that do not presuppose that they refer to any person. Moreover, this complete description would

include all the relevant causes of one’s action (or character), most of which will have been

outside the agent’s domain of control. It is as if humanity had assumed that each person’s

characteristics, behavior, motives, and values were in her basket of control, and that, once the

science of human nature developed, we started removing items from this basket—schizophrenia,

brain tumors, and even less ordinarily compulsive items such as political orientation (which is

now shown to be heritable) and attraction toward others.

If I had Ted Bundy’s genes and early environment, I would be him. There is nothing more

in me, or of me, or that constitutes the sort of person I most essentially am (whatever that

nonsense is supposed to mean), than there is in Bundy. A person is, in the relevant respects,

merely a center of experience, an agent to which certain agentive qualities are attributed (to aid

in the prediction of future behavior) but which she neither caused herself to have, nor is most

essentially those qualities. There are no essences or souls, or spiritual substances. Even if there

were such things, they would not add anything to the mix, independent of one’s genetics, early

experience, structural and functional development, psychological condition, and so forth. We just

are these things; we might call it a “brute fact” of human existence.

Human society is now caught in the evolutionary gravity of interpersonal relationships,

trapped in this histrionic bubble, and it often leads each to blame those who are no more

blameworthy than the seemingly “normal” folk. The illusion, with regard to Ted Bundy, is that it
was Bundy himself who chose to be the way he is, to be the sort of person who acts as he does

and has the sort of intentions he happens to have, and thus that he deserves some drastic

punishment, in a backward-looking sense. For most of recorded history, feelings of deep

retribution have hijacked the human emotions—resentment and disapprobation, disgust, fear, and

empathy—to an extent that calls for the blaming of persons for what is in fact the sheer

unfolding of physical events as imputed to human agents. This is not only an assumption that

may be questioned—it often borders on the naively unethical.

Bundy, and other psychopaths like him, can plausibly be said to satisfy the conditions of

control invoked by many philosophers. Now, they might be inclined—and most are—to simply

stipulate exemptions in the case of overt compulsion, psychological disorder, neurological

illness, structural or functional brain impairment, phobia, direct-brain stimulation, and so on. The

“and so on” is the problem; the modern sciences of human nature reveal more and more cases

that philosophers are prone to exempt from their theories of free choice. But sooner or later, they

will exempt themselves! Most philosophers—and ordinary folk, too—agree that, when we

discover that a psychopath performs the sort of horrible acts that he does, not because he is

intrinsically evil, but because his prefrontal cortex is offline, or his amygdala is hyperactive (or,

worse yet, some combination of both), we longer blame him for his actions. No, now we blame

the malfunctioning brain—“that darn amygdala!”—or the unfortunate, indeterminate

circumstances or the relevant causal history that gave him the sort of brain that he has, and his

consequent moral character.

The Psychopath and the Ordinary

 It might be objected: “Yes, I agree that we should make an exception in the case of the

psychologically and neurophysiologically impaired. But what about ‘normal’ people? There is no

act of ‘compulsion’ in my brain, since it functions normally, and I have undergone, luckily, a

very healthy early development. I grant that it is plausible to claim that the psychopath is not

morally responsible. Why is my case in any way similar? The psychopath decides whether to

severely injure another person or not; his brain makes it the case that he cannot even form the

intention to not severely injure this person. I am free to decide whether or not to buy a car, say,

or to perform any other mundane morally-neutral action. How do you make the leap from the

psychopath case to my case?”

This is the central question. It lies at the heart of the disagreement between many in the

freedom and moral responsibility debate. Here, I offer one of the ways I might reply. First,

compulsion (broadly construed) is in large part a matter of degree, as I’ve suggested above. The

psychopath may be 100 percent compelled—by certain brain impairments or childhood trauma—

to severely injure another person. I may be, while fully neurologically healthy, compelled by

subliminal advertising, priming or availability biases, undue societal pressure, or even poverty, to

perform a certain action. These are all things that influence a person’s judgement and may

overturn her decision completely The same cannot be said of her imaginary doppelganger, in

another universe, who is fully rational and therefore unphased by such irrelevant heuristics. The

extent of compulsion that is sufficient to ground non-blameworthiness is an open question. If the

percentage of compulsion by some factor is 0.05, then we tentatively feel justified in blaming

someone for a wrong act. But at what point does blame evaporate? 0.35? 0.48? Libertarians hang

their hat on the equilibrium, those indeterminate toss-up decisions that really could go either

way, each with an objective probability of 0.5. Does this seem right? Are we to place freedom in
the tiny wedge of the unresolved—to grant responsibility on account of one side of the coin, but

not the other? Add to this the fact that compulsion—however subtle—compounds to make one

action particularly likely, and you can see why I take robust free agency to be a

phenomenological hallucination.

Recall above the objection that attempted to delineate clear-cut compulsion (as in the

psychopath’s case) to seemingly no compulsion (in the case of “normal” folk). The objector

claimed that she was “free to decide whether or not to buy a car.” But consider that the effect of

priming interferes with this sort of decision also. Subtle, subliminal influences quite literally

compel us to purchase cars, when we did not necessarily have such an intention in the first place.

According to one study, merely asking subjects a question like “Do you intend to buy a new car

in the next six months?” increased automobile purchase by 35 percent.1 A similar finding (albeit

a slightly weaker one) suggests that the same can be done with voting (a 25% increase). Thus,

the ways in which our brains are wired, and the context of our immediate environment, influence

(and often overturn) the decisions we make. The operation on auto-pilot via heuristics distorts

judgements to a significant degree, but the crucial point is that there is nothing in the agent that

changes between possible worlds. She is not a difference-maker in the world, as it were, and yet

her action—her decision—is overturned in accord with a change in the her immediate

circumstances. The mere presence of the subliminal artifact in the environment is occasionally

sufficient to ensure that she does or chooses what she did not necessarily intend to do or choose.

And she is not conscious of any of it. The variable in this case is not the agent or her “will,” but

rather the universe itself. The agent seems to disappear; all of the relevant psychological

conditions in her are identical, yet a factor that was external to her compelled her to do, and want

to do, otherwise. The lack of control is glaring.

 Return to the source criterion of freedom. Those who claim that luck (or anything about

human nature or our psychological constitution) does not undermine freedom could conceivably

deny that freedom requires that one be the ultimate source of one’s action, motives, reasons,

values, and so forth. In other words, it may in fact be possible to draw a line that that separates

free agents, or persons, from mere dust, provided that the perquisites of free agency do not

include ultimate sourcehood, as it were. Many philosophers who endorse a reasons-responsive

account of free choice would, and do, claim this. They say that to be free is to recognize, and

respond to, reasons. A person—a psychopathic murderer, say—is not free, given that she (or,

more likely, he) is unreachable, in a sense, or would not modify his behavior in the light of new

reasons for so doing. This is prima facie plausible, but it invites quite a few objections. Recall

that it was conceivable to not demand that persons be ultimate sources of their actions, motives,

values, and so on. Let’s grant this distinction for the sake of argument. It simply moves the

question backward, so to speak, since the reasons themselves occur to one by chance. But this

would surely be denied also, so consider this, then. These reasons, even if it is irrelevant that

everything is due to chance, are themselves illegitimate, in many cases. Recall, for instance, the

nature of human social psychology that misattributes feelings of attraction. The inputs we use to

evaluate reasons—feelings, and sensory information, for example—often unconsciously shape

behavior, in ways which are undeniable. One may deny that the source of the reasons that occur

to a person is irrelevant, but they cannot dodge the fact that many of the reasons (or motives,

preferences, values, and so forth) used to inform decision-making are illegitimate, unconscious,

and erroneously incorporated into action.

 An Unsatisfying Non-Solution

I am inclined to believe that there is no solution to this problem of luck and the totality of

compulsion. The progress of the scientific age is in some sense a function of discovering the

laws of nature and, from the perspective of the universe, peering into human affairs. This project

of viewing humanity sub specie aeternatitis is a sobering dethronement of our ordinary

interpersonal relations. These two perspectives—what I call the ultimate and the mundane—are

quite possibly irreconcilable. But perhaps one of them is right. Perhaps we can indulge in our

primeval desire to have cosmic significance and to shield ourselves from the laws of nature.

Perhaps we can erect a bubble around the dimension of human affairs, knowing full well that it is

ultimately nonsense, but nonetheless advertise humanity with a sign that reads: “Agency and

selfhood beyond this point (but none of it is ultimately in our control).”

Thomas Nagel, in his remarkable piece on “Moral Luck,” agrees to a large extent, and

captures the wider problem elegantly:

The problem arises, I believe, because the self which acts and is the object of moral judgment is threatened

with dissolution by the absorption of its acts and impulses into the class of events. Moral judgment of a

person is judgment not of what happens to him, but of him…The effect of concentrating on the influence of

what is not under his control is to make this responsible self seem to disappear, swallowed up by the order

of mere events…I believe that in a sense the problem has no solution, because something in the idea of

agency is incompatible with actions being events, or people being things. But as the external determinants

of what someone has done are gradually exposed, in their effect on consequences, character, and choice

itself, it becomes gradually clear that actions are events and people things. Eventually nothing remains

which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a portion of the larger

sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised. 4
 If there is a solution, it is to be found in the nature of the interpersonal relationships.

Science, for its part, might inform the public of the various subtle perceptual illusions that seize

control from persons. Perhaps society may, with the aid of artificial intelligence and other

technology, diminish the objective probability of various “compulsions,” so that persons ipso

facto become arguably free in some weak sense. This may work against the charm of

humanity—with all its irrationality, delusion, and paradox—but it would render persons free in a

superficial way. I find it helpful to consider whether an artificial intelligence, or a mere

computer, could be built in such a way that it would be free in our sense of the term, and then

consider in what regard persons would be more or less free than the machine. Or, if one is

uncomfortable with pondering the innards of machinery, one can look instead to chimpanzee

bands, imagine a slightly more complex and intelligent species, and consider in what fashion

freedom would emerge—if it wasn’t already present in the chimpanzee society. Regardless, it is

clear to me that there are two perspectives in this debate—the mundane and the ultimate—and

that they provide fundamentally incompatible answers to the question of freedom, and whether it

withstands the precarious unfolding of life’s lottery.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have argued that two criteria for freedom which are generally taken to be

important loci of human agency—control and sourcehood—are undermined by the growing

knowledge of the “external determinants” of human choice and action. Moreover, compulsion is

ordinarily assumed to be strictly overt and noticeable, but I maintain that it is ubiquitous and

borders on the ineluctable. One explanation for the former erroneous belief is an assumption

made about the sort of metaphysical self that “rationally” guides thought; another is the
phenomenological tug of the emotions. Finally, human psychology is such that it is susceptible to

significant subliminal influence, unconscious cognitive bias, and so on, and this is where it is

plausible to find the jump from disordered agents to “normal” agents. Persons might be freer

than bacteria, or mere dust, but this quasi-freedom is in no way as robust as one would hope.

Notes

1. Foster, C. A. et al. (1998), “Arousal and Attraction: Evidence for Automatic and
Controlled Processes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (1), pp. 86-101.
2. Dutton, D., & Aron, A. P. (1974), “Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under
conditions of high anxiety,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 23, pp. 510-
517.
3. Foster, C. A. et al., “Arousal and Attraction: Evidence for Automatic and Controlled
Processes.”
4. Nagel, Thomas (1979), “Moral Luck,” reprinted in Mortal Questions (New York:
Cambridge University), pp. 24-38.