[b]
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Since I have taken my own “existential leap” to “free will”, the question I always focus on is not whether “I” have some capacity to control the choices I make [I presume that I do] but the extent to which “I” can ever really grasp how much control is really within my reach.
Again, some things that we choose to do are more or less embedded in necessity. We can’t choose to forgo food and water or we will die. We can’t choose to be successful at some task unless we first learn how to do it. We can’t choose to ignore the laws of nature or we will suffer the consequences.
Similarly, we can’t not choose a moral or a political agenda if we wish to interact with others.
But here the choices are different in that they do not revolve around either/or so much as is/ought. It is one thing to make choices when you are a doctor aborting a fetus, another thing altogether when you are an ethicist arguing which choice is moral and which immoral.
That’s the part I focus on pertaining to dasein and conflicting goods.
In other words, some choices revolve around either/or. Either you choose to do the right thing [the thing aligned objectively with reality] or you will not accomplish the task the choice aims toward.
Even if the doctor does presume that she is free to choose to perform abortions, there are particular choices that she must make [of necessity] if she wishes to do this successfully. This transcends dasein and conflicting goods.
But for the ethicist, dasein and conflicting goods are marbled through and through her decisions.
And that’s where my “dasein dilemma” comes into play. Just having free will does not enable someone to choose “the right thing to do” when confronted with the conflicting value judgments embedded in the abortion wars. Whereas one can choose the right course of action if the task revolves instead around aborting the baby.