Upon reflection it seems to me that questions of “free will” are little more than considerations of whether or not you “get what you want”.
Moreover: whether you get what you want in a social context - with people rather than things, particularly peoples’ intentions as the major factor - if they are to be seen as getting in the way of what you want.
With Fixed Cross’s “the slave’s will to be free from something” and James S Saint’s “freedom from authoritarian oppression, as in “freedom fighters””, this is most apparent. I am supposing it is also apparent in Fixed Cross’s “proper man willing to be free to his own will”, though no doubt there is more room for the “proper man” to look to the manipulation of their non-human environment in order to get what they want to an even greater degree (as well as looking to slave-like humans in much the same way).
~To the extent that other people may get in the way of what you want, your free will is more or less free.~
I suppose this is over all something of a class or master/slave morality issue.
However, to bring this back to an ethological framework, whether your environmental influences include a human/social element or not, the behaviours of both authoritarians and proper men, freedom fighters and slaves are equally a product of a genetic-environmental interaction. Trace the chain of causation back further and further and it becomes more and more apparent that neither one’s genes nor their environment came about of their “free will”. You cannot choose where and to whom you are born - and every choice you make from there on is determined by these things, and the subsequently determined choices that are incrementally made entirely as an indirect result of these initial conditions.
Neither are free, regardless of to whom they direct their evaluations of the extent of their “free will” (to or from) - others or their selves…
Even their wills are cultivated entirely within this causal and entirely determined chain, and thus not free.
~What I hope to move onto is the consequences of the above~
Of course the experience of will and any freedom of it is not diminished by any of this. A naive interpretation of it might be “why try if it’s all determined anyway”. This can be easily turned on its head: “why not try if it’s all determined anyway” - it’s just that whether or not you feel motivated by the fact that all your thoughts, actions, desires and choices are determined… is ultimately not up to you. But what you learn to identify as “you” and come to attribute to “you” emerges nonetheless - so in the sense that people naturally come to think of themselves as carved out and distinct from the causal chain that caused you to think in this way, you still become “free to will” and decide in whatever way “you” see fit within whatever social and otherwise environment that you find think of yourself as “in”. And this delusion has probably proven to be a beneficial one: to be much less able to see the causal chain that determined everything you were, are and will be, than you are to see “you” as the ultimate start of the process of choosing.
So it is identity that comes into question yet again, upon an appreciation of the above.
If identity is some kind of “locus of control”, as it usually seems to be perceived, and yet it is actually controlled by all that surrounds it in a continuous chain of causation, does it actually have a beginning and an end? Is it any wonder that thought experiments such as Theseus’ ship and “removing parts of you until you are no longer you” produce such indistinct results? It seems to me that identity is fuzzy at best, and more of a failure to perceive the bigger causal picture than anything.
Given the positive reception of my initial premise, I wonder how many of you I am losing as I develop it?