Recently, my mother came to visit for a week. She bought some butter while she was here, since I didn’t have any. I don’t normally eat butter, but I do now. In fact, I’ve been eating it at every meal and putting it on everything I eat. I’d forgotten just how delicious it is. I now see other foods as mere vehicles for the greasy indulgence. After multiple failed attempts at self-restraint, I've reached this conclusion: as long as there is butter in my kitchen, I will consume it in a shamefully gluttonous fashion.
We like to think that we have free will, that we make decisions for ourselves–even if they’re trivial, like what to have for breakfast. But because I have a weakness for butter, whether or not I ate it over the past few days was largely determined by my mother, when she left a half pound of the decadent gold lard on my counter top.
Our breakfast choices, in general, seem to be largely determined by factors that are beyond our immediate control. Maybe you’d like to have toast and peanut butter for breakfast, but you won’t if someone else polished off the last of the bread. Or perhaps you’ve overslept and don’t have time for breakfast, or maybe you’ll be meeting with a friend who has a severe peanut allergy. The very fact that you desire toast and peanut butter may also be beyond your control. You could have awakened not feeling hungry at all. Sure, the choice is yours, but what you choose depends on a myriad of factors that are not within your control.
Debates about free will have been waged for millenia. They’ll probably continue far into the future as the issue is complex, but we should be able to agree on this: our actions, at least to a large extent, are determined by factors that are beyond our immediate control. These factors can be internal or external, or more often a combination of the two.
For example, the rituals of obsessive-compulsive disorder are largely determined by neurobiology. Many of us have minor compulsive habits, but at more extreme levels, obsessive compulsive behaviors, like repetitive hand washing and compulsive hair pulling, can get manifestly weird. People don’t choose to act this way and they generally can’t will themselves to stop. These behaviors are determined by internal factors, but they are nonetheless beyond the individual’s immediate control.