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Freedom, Freewill, Choices, actions and consequences

Sometimes, of course, what we want or feel is within our control. But that is only ever true because we can, to a degree, influence what we want or feel through our prior actions. 

You can, for example, increase your  desire for food by taking a run; or you can reduce pain by applying ointment, or by deliberately concentrating your  mind on last year’s holiday,  and so forth. 

Your  direct control of your  actions can, through the effect of your  actions on passive occurrences such as wants and feelings, give you some indirect control over these wants and feelings as well. 

Your control over our actions extends to give you control over those actions’ consequences too. 

But your freedom is still ultimately a freedom of action. Freedom is always exercised through action – through what we deliberately do or refrain from doing – and through action alone.

This tight connection between freedom and action is very important. It means that to understand what freedom involves, we shall also need to understand the nature of human action, that medium through which, it seems, we can exercise our freedom.

 Here we come to the issue of decision-making and its place in freedom.

 Especially in late antiquity and in the Middle Ages, philosophers used to explain the link between action and freedom in terms of the will. 

The very term ‘free will problem’ as a description of a problem about freedom of action reminds us how general was this belief in an identity of freedom of action with freedom of will. 

Freedom was taken to be essentially a characteristic of decision or choice – all freedom was a freedom of the will. We immediately controlled our decisions – and we controlled everything else through our decisions. 

Freedom was tied to action because decision-making or choice was a central component of, indeed the immediate form taken by, human action. 

Freedom applied to action, then, because to act was to exercise a free will.

You can choice what to feel.

You can make your ejaculations longer by deliberately concentrating your mind  on other things during sexual intercourse.

You can decide not to get loan (to avoid the consequences of debt) and find alternative to earn money.

Everything lies within your freewill, choices and decisions


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