I'm not being deceptive, I'm simply using a term in a way you don't seem not to approve of. Also, to be clear, I'm not saying that people aren't allowed to make any choices that don't belong to them, simply that their ability to do so does not require protection.

I'm happy to leave it there though.

Again, you are demanding more of "understanding" than I am. I am simply requiring that a person knows what choice they are making and what it means to make that choice such that they are able to apply their rationality to it, not that they understand every aspect of that choice and everything that might lead from it. Also, the fact that someone might think they understand something and be wrong isn't problematic in the sense of causing a problem for my or other moral theories. People are wrong all the time, that's not really an issue.

No, it isn't fraud if you buy someone dinner because you think they can play guitar. It might be if you buy tickets to their show and their show doesn't exist. And no, laughing at someone you've tricked also isn't restricting their freedom (specifically, when I say not restricting their freedom here, I mean the specific type of freedom I have been advocating for). This isn't a vague or ill-considered distinction, it's fairly clear.

Yes, you can restrict the meaning of freedom to a specific type of freedom within a specific context. You're just wrong on that front. It is indeed a type of freedom, and I'm not sure how I could make my language much more clear. Without wishing to be rude, it does sometimes feel as though you are intentionally misunderstanding me.

I mean, you definitely do misunderstand, but it isn't a misunderstanding that restricts your freedom in this way. You are free to continue using your device to express your views whether or not those views stem from a misunderstanding.

It is the freedom to make certain choices that I am advocating for, I don't think I have ever been less than clear about that.

I mean, yeah I am very much assuming that all moral facts are true whether or not anyone knows them, including any "rights" that people have. I feel like I explained that before, certainly in my original primer. Have you been under the impression that I was taking some position other than moral realism and objectivism?

You keep talking about true definitions, but the definitions of words aren't terribly important. If you wish to call the thing I am promoting schmeedom, then that's fine. What is at issue is the ability of moral agents to exercise the things that make them moral agents in the first place (free will and rationality) over those choices that belong to them.

In the case of deception, it's about what the person is being decieved about. Being able to "understand' one's choices is a fairly low bar to clear, but it can be affected by deception in some cases. Fraud isn't the only case but it's a simple one to explain. For example, might involve me agreeing to pay a large sum of money for a car that hasn't been driven many kilometers and is in good condition, but what is being delivered is a car that has driven a lot of kilometers and is being held together with blutack and hope. In such a case, you have not delivered on your agreement and have essentially stolen my money through fraud. If, however, you tell people that are an excellent guitar player so they will think you are cool, then you have not violated their freedom. The deception hasn't prevented them from making their own choices. Even if those choices involve you (such as whether they want to invite you to dinner). Another case might be misrepresenting a risk of something, such that a person is put at risk they didn't agree to. Or misrepresenting what might be involved in a medical procedure, such that a person has things done to them they have not consented to. Point being, there are ways you can violate freedom through deception, but most cases of simple lying will not do so.

I mean, I am not sure how to be more clear about this. I contend that a specific type of freedom should be protected, specfically that of persons over those choices that belong to them. By "morally relevant" I mean that the ability to understand and make such a choice (one that doesn't belong to you) does not have moral value. I don't mean that there is no moral content in the choice. And no, the choice to travel in the plane still wouldn't belong to you because the plane doesn't belong to you. What you do or don't have in your possession isn't at issue, what matters is what belongs to you, what choices you (for lack of a better phrase) have a right to make.

No, to have a right (a moral right anyway, which I assume is the kind we are talking about) to something is not about whether your choice is protected by legal principles. Women had a moral right to own property (assuming that people have such a right) in the same way as men before they were granted a legal right to do the same. It is very much one's moral rights I am concerned with, not their legal ones.

I am not sure what you think I have reversed. I am saying that I think the thing that rights theories ultimately protect is the type of freedom I am proposing is morally valuable. That is very much tying rights to freedom and not the other way around. I just thought that using the language of rights might be helpful as you seem to be having trouble with the language of freedom.

No, in practice we both specify what people are or ought to be free to do or be and what restrictions they ought to be free from. Both are sensible ways of discussing what is meant by "freedom" in a specific context and what kind of freedom (or definition of freedom if you prefer) is valuable and which isn't.

No, I don't think deception is a restriction on free thinking... most of the time. As I've said, there are some cases where it is, such as fraud. But most of the time, no. And, for the same reason, education is not a restriction on freedom in the way you describe. Hate speech can indeed incite violence, and it is possible that in some circumstances there is an argument for restricting it, but it does not itself violate anyone's freedom, so restricting it is (if and when it is ever appropriate) a case of doing something bad to prevent something worse from happening.

You are ascribing motives to me that are unfair. I think the "restrictions" you are suggesting, such as education, simply aren't restrictions. It isn't a matter of not thinking they are because I want restrictions to be bad. It is a matter of not thinking they are because they aren't.

I'm not totally sure what you are talking about regarding childhood, but I will attempt to answer what appears to be the core question. Specifically, I would quite happily say that there are all sorts of things that restrict a person's choices, their "freedom" if you like, but don't restrict the kind of freedom I have identified as morally relevant. For example, my lack of a private plane "restricts" my choice to take my private plane when traveling. But this isn't a choice that belongs to me, so the fact it is "restricted" in this way isn't morally relevant.

No, a right is not very different from freedom. I think, properly understood, rights are ultimately about the kind of freedom I have been discussing. To have a right to something is to have a choice of whether to do that thing, or what to do with that thing. For example, a right to life entails a right to die, a right to speak entails a right to stay silent. I'm very happy have any future discussions without the language of rights. I should say now that doing so wouldn't quite be accurate, as I would say my theory aims to protect the thing at the core of rights theories, rather than rights themselves, and there is some baggage associated with rights that isn't applicable, such as rights being trumps and each right being kind of seperate from each other one, rather than a single underlying value as I would suggest. But, bearing that in mind, we can talk about freedom consequentialism as a consequentialism of rights from now on.

In your last post you said "To "be free to act in some way" is completely meaningless if not oxymoronic. Say we name a specific type of activity, as the specified "some way", and say that the agent is free to act in this way. This means that we allow this option. But the agent being free, may choose not to act in that way, but to act in a contrary way. In that sense, "to be free to act in that specific way" is completely meaningless, because the agent is also free to act in any way."
It was this that I was taking issue with. Hence pointing out that being free to act in some specific way is a perfectly sensible thing to say, and doesn't require freedom to act in all possible contrary ways or that freedom be completely unrestrained by anything.

I agree that there are... some cases where we might need to constrain what someone is saying. Generally threats, fraud, and incitement to violence. Quite a lot of other things, like just deception generally or hate speech, needs no constraint as it doesn't restrict others freedom. Children are an interesting case because they aren't really persons yet. It's better to think of them as the same agent as their future self and so deserving of moral protection, but not currently able to understand most of their own choices so those choices need to be protected for them by guardians. A lot of these supposed problems aren't really problems though. There are some interesting conflicts, but the more obvious ones seem to amount to someone trying to put their property or themself in a place where they have no "right" to be (eg, their car on top of my foot) and the answer seems to be "no, you can't do that".

Without getting back into why habits aren't restrictions on the will, I'm not really sure what kind of restrictions you are concerned about. A person's free will is not diminished by being locked in a cell, so being unable to change the past just doesn't seem like a concern.

I mean, it really isn't. Moral restraint might well be what people ought to show in order to stick to only their own choices, but it isn't what is being protected. What is being protected is the ability of persons (free, rational agents) to make a certain kind of choice (those that belong to them). That isn't to say that all other choices ought to be restricted. There are lots of choices that I might want to make that don't need protecting, but also don't require prohibiting.

An alternative way of thinking about the kind of freedom that freedom consequentialism seeks to protect is that it is plausibly the same thing protected by some rights theories. Would conceptualizing it as a consequentialism of rights help you?

Yes, I would agree that thinking that lots of different types of freedom should all be protected could easily lead to conflicts which might not be resolvable without reference to some other value. People tend not to do that though. Generally when we talk about different types of freedom, we are debating which one is really worth protecting or promoting. Certainly in my case I have advocated for protecting a specific type.

Again, you seem to be defining "free" in a very strange way. It seems entirely reasonable for the police for example to say of someone "you are free to leave". It is clear what this means: there are not restrictions being placed on you leaving. It doesn't require that it also be true that the person is free to go to the moon.

I defined own choices as concerning those things that belong to a person, their mind, their body, and their property. I agree that there could be some conflicts specifically with property and movement, but it isn't clear that there would be many. What conflicts in the public sphere are you concerned about? And I wouldn't insist that a moral agent is one who reasons morally, assuming that by "reasons morally" you mean something like "reasons in a morally good way".

Having free will definitely doesn't mean being free of will. I had assumed that you were familar with the term "free will", but I will clarify it for you if you like. There are a lot of ways one might define free will, and I suspect there are those who think my definition is claiming too much, but I would say that to have free will is to be able to act in ways that are caused wholly be the agent, not determined by preceding events or scripted responses, and not in-principle predictable ahead of time.

The ability of free, rational agents to understand and make their own choices is exactly how I use "freedom". I agree that I do only want to protect certain choices, specifically persons' own choices. The choices that belong to them. I am not being inconsistent at all.

So long as people are being clear about what they mean, equivocation doesn't seem to come into it. I agree that freedom certainly has something to do with being unconstrained, but there are lots of types of freedom, lots of ways of being unconstrained from various things, that we might want to discuss. It seems that we could simply specify what we mean (which I have, numerous times) and then discuss whether that type of freedom is important or not, rather than getting hung up on linguistics.

I wouldn't say having freedom is quite the same as having a car, but I would also say that it isn't like having the quality of greenness.

No, in my examples, "free" can be used to two ways. To say that some agent is free to act in some way is using "free" to refer to the person having freedom to act in that way. To say that someone is a free, rational agent, is using "free" to mean that the agent has free will. By "freedom" I mean the ability of free, rational agents to understand and make their own choices. I offered to use a different word, but you offered "moral constraint" which is so far divorced from how either of those words are used as to be completely inappropriate.

Also, it doesn't support your position. Even on your account of freedom, which I think is not a good one, then not choosing a definition of the word would keep some options open to us, but others would be closed until we did.

I have clearly defined how I am using the word "freedom" and why I am using that word rather than another. If you think it would be more productive, we might use another word, or simply refer to the ability of free, rational, agents to understand and make their own choices. If you like, we can just use that term (the ability of free, rational agents to understand and make their own choices) in the future and move past the whole linguistic debate.

I'm not really sure what an "objective definition" would even be. The definitions of words are either explicitly stated within specific contexts (such as within a particular discipline, or even within a particular conversation) or they are determined by usage.

Is the fact that the past can't be changed self-evident? Even if it were, what does that have to do with anything?

I agree that saying some types of impossibility are not relevant to freedom is similar to saying that only some types of freedom are morally relevant, in the sense that both are reasonable things to have a discussion about.

To "have" something doesn't just mean to have it as a property. I have a red car, but a red car isn't a property of me. Also, even if I have a property, then the conditions that allow me to have that property do not have to be inherent in me. For example, I might have the property of iridescence, but only under specific lighting. The lighting conditions would be a restriction on my having that property, but they aren't a part of me.

You keep getting caught on the idea that "freedom" must mean freedom from all restrictions to do anything. It certainly can mean that, but it's a word, it can mean lots of things. For example, when I talk about a free, rational agent, I don't mean an agent who has complete freedom, or even an agent who has much freedom at all. In that case "free" refers to the agent having free will, which is different from freedom (one doesn't lose any free will if they are chained up and kept in a box, but they certainly lose a lot of freedom).

I don't start with a concept of freedom that is less than ideal. I start with one that is compatible with all free, rational agents being capable of being entirely free, which seems far more ideal than.

This supposed contradiction seems to be predicated on you not allowing people to use words differently from how you want them to be used.

Yeah, that doesn't work.
First, we don't "start" with the idea of freedom being without any restriction or constraint. We "start" with a lot of different understandings of what people are free or should be free to do or be, and what they should be free from, and we make sense of that so we can have a sensible conversation.
Second, constraints and restrictions are not properly understood as only the properties of an agent's environment. One could make a freedom claim that people ought to be free from their habits. I wouldn't agree, but that would certainly be a "constraint" (in the sense that it is what you are claiming the person should be free from) that would not be a part of the person's environment, but of them.
Third, there is absolutely not any requirement for constraints to be a part of the agent in order for them to have a type of freedom. I'm not sure where you have got that assumption, but it clearly isn't true. It is entirely coherent to say that my freedom of movement is constrained by being kidnapped and locked in a the boot of a car.
Fourth, I haven't really made an appeal to authority, though I'll admit one might be inferred from what I said. I certainly don't mean to say that just because there is a large literature discussing something, that thing is worthy of discussion. However, it may be a literature you could benefit from examining, because I think you are mistaken about the issues you are raising regarding types of freedom.

Talking of "kinds" of freedom is not oxymoronic at all. There is a huge literature on different types of freedom, and I think we can reasonably understand different freedom claims using Gerald Maccaullm's triadic relationship, that some agent X is free from some constraint Y to do or become some thing Z. When people talk about "freedom" they very often mean different things from one another, and specifying what kind you mean is very helpful in avoiding talking at cross purposes to one another. You seem to require that "freedom" only be used to refer to freedom of people from any constraints to do anything, but that is by no means the only sensible way the word can be used. Further, the discussion of how the word ought to be used is far less interesting than the moral discussion of what has value, what are responsibilities are, and how we ought to solve moral dilemmas.

I'm not really clear on what you are trying to solve. You haven't shown at all that protecting the kind of freedom that I am discussing is incompatible with consequentialism and the kind of freedom you think is incompatible with consequentialism isn't the kind I'm trying to protect. I don't think there is a problem there.

I don't think that's a problem. I don't think we need to protect your freedom to go and stab people in the throat. In fact, I think we should restrict your ability to do that. That is very much a feature not a bug.

I mean, I would also be happy to say that I am protecting freedom to make certain types of choices, if that would be more agreeable to you linguistically.

I agree that it is moral reasoning that is being used to determine what kind of freedom we should protect and what we shouldn't, though I'm not sure that is quite what you mean when you say "moral principles". Even if it were, it still wouldn't follow that what I'm suggesting we protect is moral restraint.

Also can I take it from you not answering that you didn't read the initial primer? Because that would really help to clear a lot of this up.

Again, I haven't said that such an action would be not free or not rational.

What I am suggesting ought to be protected is not moral restraint, and you have again moved from "we don't need to protect people's choice to take others' choices away from them" to "we should only protect the choice to do what is right". These are not the same.

What I am protecting is not the developing of good habits or the curtailing of freedom in a "good way". It is the protection of a specific type of freedom.

Also no, that wouldn't show that freedom "transcends moral principles".

Did you read the primer that I included in the initial post?

I mean, that's true if by "freedom" you mean the freedom to do anything at all. I am not interested in protecting that. I am interested in protecting free, rational, agents ability to understand and make their own choices. "Freedom" seems an appropriate word for this, but if you don't think so, feel free to suggest another.

It is an instance of protecting a specific type of freedom, the freedom to make your own choices. I agree that I am not promoting the protection of the freedom to take other people's choices from them, to physically attack them, to steal from them, etc. It is true that I am not promoting the protection of freedom to do those things.

What I am proposing is that a certain type of freedom should be protected. Not, for example, the freedom to assault others. That sort of freedom should not be protected.

You have misunderstood. It is not the fact that my violent act prevents you from stealing my car that is worth considering, it is the other freedoms of yours I have violated in doing so (such as your freedom over your body).

No, the way we know what choices belong to a person are determining what things belong to them. Self-ownership is easy enough to establish, and if property can be owned, then we own that too. It is not a matter of referring to the "good choice" at all.

It is true that I am claiming that a certain type of choice should be protected, specifically those choices that belong to the person or persons in question. I have discussed the reasons for this in the primer I provided and more deeply in the material referenced within.

I am not limiting the meaning of "freedom". I am saying that only a certain type of freedom is being used as the measure of value, specifically the freedom of persons over their own choices. Only this limited kind of freedom is what ought to be protected, rather than freedom of all kinds.

I didn't say that commiting an act of violence to prevent you stealing my car wouldn't violate/restrict your freedom. When I said "stop you from doing so" I wasn't implying that I was going to physically attack you. Commiting violence in such a circumstance would restrict/violate your freedom, though of course it may be justifiable to do so as long as it prevents greater violations of freedom.

I am not arguing that a bad choice is not a free choice. You seem to be taking "this is the kind of freedom we should protect" to mean "this is the only true kind of freedom" and those do not mean the same thing.

Again, I think you may have misunderstood what I am claiming is morally relevant. The choice to steal from someone is morally relevant in the sense that it is a choice to do something morally bad but the freedom to make that choice is not morally relevant in the sense that it does not have moral weight that we need to consider when making decisions. We don't need to weigh your choice to steal my car against my choice to not have my car stolen, because one choice is the sort that should be protected morally and the other isn't.

Again, I am not defining "freedom" generally as only the kind I refer to here, but I am using "freedom" within the context of freedom consequentialism as a shorthand for "The ability of free, rational agents to understand and make their own choices". That is the thing that I am claiming is morally valuable, and I will sometimes say the freedom to make one's own choices to make that clear. I am using the word "freedom" because it seems like the most applicable of the available options, but if you have a better suggestion, I'd happily use that instead.

I am not defining freedom by reference to what is morally relevant. I am defining what is morally relevant by reference to freedom. I'm not begging the question, you have just misunderstood what I said.

As to things being morally relevant, you have gone down completely the wrong track here. Just like the utilitarian isn't concerned only with the happiness of the person in question, I am not suggesting that only "your own" freedom is morally relevant to your decision making. I am saying that everyone's freedom over that which belongs to them is morally relevant. So the moral status of an action depends on the extent to which it protects persons' freedom to make their own choices and/or the extent to which is restricts/violates persons' freedom to make their own choices.

I didn't have to make any such exceptions regarding the "public world," and I'm not sure when you think I did so.

Is it the term "morally relevant" that is causing confusion? I'm happy to use different language, but I'm not sure how I can be clearer in what I mean here.

I would say that threats that don't involve threatening to restricting one's freedom in a morally relevant way are not coercing a person in a morally relevant way. Threatening someone's property does involve threatening to violate/restrict someone's freedom in a morally relevant way, specifically their freedom over their property, so that would be coercive in a morally relevant way.

I don't think this is convoluted in the least. I think I have been fairly clear from the beginning that what is morally relevant is a person's ability to understand and make those choices that belong to them. If you keep that in mind in reading my responses, I think it will be clear what I mean.

Only threats that threaten to restrict/violate your freedom would be morally relevant. So "I will shoot you" clearly would, but "I won't be your friend anymore" wouldn't be, because someone else being your friend is their choice to make, not yours.

In the case of putting the gun to the person's head, it does restrict their freedom if they think you are actually going to kill them. If the person doesn't believe that, then they haven't really been coerced. That would be a good example of how a threat might restrict someone's freedom or not. That is no more a problem than a bullet not restricting someone's freedom if it missed them. If they believe that you will kill them and don't care, then they have been coerced and their freedom restricted, but they just don't care about the freedom you are threatening.

In the case of the bus, no. My freedom is my ability to understand and make my own choices, which I have here. None of my choices are taken from me, I just don't have all the information I might wish for. I don't need to agree that someone's choices are always restricted because I am setting a much lower bar for being free than you are.

No, ideologies, biases, and prejudices do not restrict someone's freedom (generally). Religious faith may do so more often as there is often a threat of eternal damnation or something similar involved. Freedom is restricted by threats because the choice is coerced rather than free. If I point a gun at you and tell you to give me your wallet, your choice to do so isn't free, it is coerced. I have restricted your freedom to choose what to do with your wallet by forcing you to choose between giving it up and being shot. That is how coercion restricts choices, and the same thing is going on with laws.

For a clear example of how not knowing about an option does not restrict one's choices, let's consider how I might get to work tomorrow. Let's imagine that I am considering driving or walking, but I don't know that a bus route has opened up near my house and goes right by my work. My lack of knowledge about the bus route here doesn't make my choice less free. My freedom isn't restricted by the fact that I could have done things that I didn't know about or just didn't consider. I am still able to apply my rationality to the choice in question and make it freely. That there were other options I didn't consider is not a problem.

I don't think that is how habits work at all, but even if we imagine that it is, not realizing an option was available to you (generally) isn't a restriction on your freedom either. You are setting too high a bar for freedom.

I think Amadeus has covered my response to habits fairly well. An option not occurring to you is not a restriction of your freedom. It's just you not thinking about an option that you had.

I agree that thought is mediating the way which coercion violates someone's freedom, but it is doing that by making the person make a choice between one of their freedom's being violated and another. In the case of the habit, the person's choice isn't being restricted at all. These things are different.

No, the threat really does restrict your freedom. It isn't just a reason to act, it is coercing you to act in a way by threatening your freedom. Choosing to do someone for the other reasons you mentioned is not the same, as the choice is free and not coerced.

Not at all. Property can only be owned in a morally relevant sense if it can be owned without laws and property.

Difficult and impossible are not the same thing. Further, people do choose difficult things all the time. Further, not wanting to do something and not being able to are not the same thing.

That is like saying that nailing your hands to a wall doesn't restrict your freedom, since it is your hands that are preventing you from moving. The two thoughts are not morally similar, as one requires the person to choose while their freedom is at risk (due to the threat of punishment) while the other is just someone choosing not to do something.

I mean, I think I disagree, but I'm also not saying that the choices can't involve other people.

What I am claiming is that the measure of moral value is the ability of free, rational agents to understand and make their own choices. By "their own choices" I mean choices over those things that belong to them, their minds, bodies and property.

I mean, a choice being "difficult" in that sense is morally irrelevant. It's not a real restriction on the choice.

Again, laws restrict our freedom because they come with threats attached. If laws didn't carry the threat of punishment, they wouldn't restrict our freedom either.

No, I am saying that only the freedom to make certain kinds of choices is morally valuable. Specifically, the choices over that which belongs to the person, their mind, their body, and their property.

I am not "in denial", though I am denying the truth of your assertion. I do not lack understanding, your claim just isn't so.

You can characterize them as neural pathways if like, but a reinforced neural pathway does not prevent a person from choosing to think differently.

People are able to act against their habits and, in some cases, they are morally required to do so. Knowing the right thing to do and not doing it does not show that you were unable to do it.

No, I am not saying that being "under the influence of habit" affects whether a choice belongs to a person at all. I am saying that habits are not a relevant factor because they don't restrict freedom. I am also saying, seperately, that the only freedom that is morally relevant is the kind over those things which belong to us. These are two seperate claims.

No, I don't imply that you shouldn't make that choice (though in this case you shouldn't). What I am saying is that your freedom to make that choice is not morally valuable because that choice doesn't belong to you. My freedom to keep my car on the other hand is valuable because my car does belong to me.

It doesn't matter whether you are habituated to good action or bad action, both are still available to you. You have free will and your habits do not get in the way of you exercising that to choose to do good, or do bad.

Whether that choice belongs to you is very much morally relevant, because that is the type of freedom that FC is trying to protect: that over those choices that belong to the person in question.

No, a habit isn't a restriction of one's freedom.

No, the principle I'm claiming is that my car, being my property, is something that belongs to me and not something that you get to make choices over, morally speaking. As I mentioned in the primer, the kind of freedom being protected here is specifically over those choices that belong to you. Whether or not to steal my car is not a choice that belongs to you, because it is [my car.

Freedom of choice vs freedom to act is not a distinction I am drawing. When I talk about "freedom" in this context, I mean the ability of persons to understand and make those choices that belong to them. But that does include being able to actually do the thing. But yes, this includes freedom to actually do the thing, rather than just choose it in an abstract sense.

Because a threat to your freedom is being imposed in one case (you better not steal or else), and in the other case you are just acting in a not very considered way, which is your "right" (term isn't quite accurate, but useful in this context).

I mean, the type of freedom is quite a limited one already. It isn't the freedom to do anything that is to be protected, it is the freedom to make choices over what belongs to the person in question. If you want to steal my car and prevent you doing that, that hasn't violated your freedom in a morally relevant way (depending on how I do the preventing) because stealing my car was not your choice to make.

I didn't mean to suggest that you were involving everybody, just everybody affected by the decision in question. In the case of the cure for blindness, I'm not sure how this is different from just going with that the majority wants (the majority of people who, as it were, have some skin in the game). And, as that idea won't fly because what the majority wants doesn't matter, I'm not sure how filtering that through economics helps.

I'm not drawing a sharp distinction between mental and physical constraints, I'm simply pointing out that having a habit isn't a proper constraint in the sense of restricting your freedom. No is social conformity etc. Laws are a restriction of freedom because they come with a threat against said freedom attached.

I'm not sure what you take the opposite assertion to be in this context, so I don’t know whether i agree or not.

I mean, I certainly wouldn't go so far as to say that external states can't cause internal states, but yes I would agree with the general point that free will requires our actions to be caused by us in a way that is not just a part of a deterministic causal chain. And yes, I would agree that we need to be able to understand it a bit. And I think we do understand it a bit. Not fully, but given that what we are trying to protect is a person's ability to understand and make choices, and we can understand the ways in which that can be prevented from happening (or many of them at least), then it seems like we can get some good protecting done without having a full understanding of how free will works.

No, I'm perfectly happy to say that a state of mind could reduce freedom. I just don't think that the ones you are talking about do.

Perhaps I can clarify with an example. Let's say I choose to chop off my leg. This prevents me from doing a bunch of stuff with it in the future, but this is not problematic. So long as I am choosing to remove/destroy the thing, then I am choosing to give up those things and therefore my freedom over them.

In the same way, if I choose to have a sandwich for breakfast instead of eggs on toast, I might be giving up the other (I mean, I could have both, but I wouldn't want to), but it's my choice to make (assuming some things about access to the foods in question). The making of the choice doesn't restrict my freedom, it exercises it.

I mean, it's a nice idea. I don't it works, but a nice idea.

My first questions are:
1. What about things that people don't generally think of "paying" for?
2. Isn't aggregating in this way functionally the same as using a majority to resolve conflicts, except with economic flavor?

Being dishonest doesn't always impair our ability to apply our rationality to choices, though in this case it would, and would be morally similar to stealing through fraud. Good spotting, heh.

I am indeed very happy to pay out the money if someone comes up with the answer. I have it sitting in an account waiting for just such a person. Yeah, I must admit that I find that cynicism frustrating. Scepticism is great, and you certainly shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet, but automatically assuming that everyone is out to get you seems like a fairly poor filter as well. I like to run an assignment in my environmental ethics class where students submit arguments on where I should donate a thousand dollars of my own money, with the winning charity recieving that money, and there have definitely been some in the past who just assume the money isn't real.

Yes, I do plan on engaging with respondants.

People doing the wrong thing due to akrasia, or weakness of will, is not a case of their freedom being restricted, but rather them failing to do the right thing, and I think this is what you are describing here when you talk about habits.

I mean, I think I can have a reaosnably clear understanding of mental causes and effects in the same way that I can have a reasonably clear understanding of causes and effects outside of my mind. By observing that one follows the other, theorizing a causal mechanism that explains how one might cause the other, and then testing that casual mechanism in ways that attempt to falsify it. Obviously our minds are complex, but so is the world, there are plenty of confounding variables to be had in both. The assertion that we can know causes and effects in one but not the other seems unsupported.

Whether the consequences of an action are good or bad is not the same as whether we know whether they are good or bad, but I agree that the latter does rely on observation (though induction is less clear). I would say that describing what is "most probable" in terms of an action leading from a mental state is probably inappropriate as it involves a choice. But predicting how a thought might lead to an emotion seems doable. Also, I fundamentally disagree that not choosing increases ones freedom, so all of this discussion about whether or not we can see the consequences of not choosing and instead engaging in contemplation (which does seem to be implied by what you are saying), is really just debating an ancillary claim you made.

I'm inclined to agree with Hume that rationality is means-ends, rather than normative in the sense of setting rational goals. We want what we want, and rationality tells us how to get there (I wouldn't go quite as far as Hume in this regard, but that's rather a different issue.

Less "it just is" and more, "if morality is the way in which persons ought to be or act regardless of their wants, then asking why they ought to follow it is a bit pointless".

Goodness isn't a limit on our freedom. If I have many options and am free to pursue any of them, but only some (or one) of them is the right option that I should pursue, that doesn't limit my freedom at all. It may be helpful to think of freedom as allowing moral agents to determine what they do with their lives. Rather than proscribing that there is a good life everyone should pursue, the good is in each person being able to determine what they pursue, or don't pursue, by being able to make choices regarding what belongs to them. If you want to pursue creating great art at the expense of your own happiness, that's fine, it isn't morally better or worse than pursuing your own happiness, it's just personal preference. Where morality comes in is if someone takes away your choices (the ones that belong to you) that allow you to do so. The good is really just removing the bad, and the bad is in moral agents not being able to make use of the faculties that make them moral agents in the first place.

Yeah, I think that it is incorrect that people will necessarily enjoy their virtue (that is how I am interpreting your use of "should" here, correct me if I'm wrong) or doing the right thing. Doing what is right might well be a pain in the proverbial. It seems entirely plausible that one might not wish to help someone, but do so because it is their duty. Further, while their motives would not be morally relevant, I might think that the person who does the right thing because it's right (What Kant might call acting from duty) even when they don't personally want to more praiseworthy than the person who does good and always wants to and enjoys it.

yes I think perfectly rational agents can plausibly all want and choose different things. This need not be arbitrary, it might be instead related to what those agents want.

To say that there is nothing they "should" choose is different. They should choose what is morally right. Not because that is what rationality dictates but because that is what it means for something to be morally right. Morality is the categorical imperative, the thing we should do regardless of our desires. Why should we do what's right? Because that is what "should" means.