Marc asked:

Is freedom a matter of doing what one wants to do?

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My answer to your question depends on whether we are talking about the problem of political
freedom, or the problem of freedom of the will.

In his essay On LibertyJ.S. Mill defined the 'principle of liberty' which he wished to defend, as the
freedom to do whatever you want, provided your actions do not harm anyone else. This qualification
is important, because without it no form of political organization would be possible. A serious difficulty
with the principle, however, is how you define 'harm'. If you are deeply offended by someone's
appearance, or their sexual orientation does that mean they have 'harmed' you? Are you 'harmed' by
people who refuse to wear seat belts, just because part of the extra costs borne by the accident and
emergency services comes out of taxes? And so on.

One solution proposed to the problem of the apparent incompatibility of freedom of will with
determinism, is to define a free action as an action I might not have done, if I had chosen not to.
According to this definition, I am free provided that I am not made to do the action by someone else
exerting force on me, and provided that I am mentally able to make a rational choice between
alternatives. It follows that even though my action is determined by my psychological states, I can still
act freely. The flaw in this 'compatibilist' strategy, I believe, is that it fails to face up to the problem that
worries us about determinism. If I had chosen differently, I would have acted differently. But given my
psychological state at the time when I made the decision, I could not have chosen differently.

Either way, freedom is not simply 'doing what one wants to do'.

Geoffrey Klempner