Known on Wiki. Or at least talked about on Wiki.

And that is Isaiah Berlin's point about free will in The Sense Of Reality. He can't prove that it exists. But if we don't accept it as a reality, vast amounts of our language become meaningless.

The choice is yours. Or not, as the case may be.

Berlin's other point, the one he is mainly driving at, is that deterministic philosophies have always tended towards totalitarian human regimes. An exactly analogous point has been made by Meic Pearse about deterministic Augustinian or Calvinist thinking being used through earlier history to suppress human freedom on behalf of tyrannical government. According to Meic and Isaiah, this line of thinking has always had to do with buttressing human power.

The only difference being perhaps that at least with the earlier "Christian" versions the person of Jesus as key revealer of God was allowed a look-in. This tempered the worst effects of the pagan determinism with mercy. Once the same philosophy had become fiercely atheistical, denying any historicity to Jesus, often in reaction to earlier church abuses, there was no stopping the colossal mass murder of totalitarianism in the Short Century just finished. -- Richard Drake

This whole area makes me a bit uncomfortable. I tend toward the rationalist anti-Free Will argument and find it hard to conjure up any reasons to believe in Free Will, or even to write down a definition of it. But it's clear how this deterministic (give or take a quantum fluctuation) viewpoint can give support to all sorts of nasty political ideas. So how do I reconcile the fact that I like liberal, democratic, ethically well-behaved systems with the fact that I can't justify them philosophically or demonstrate that they're stable in the long term? The Categorical Imperative isn't enough to ensure longevity. -- Leigh Caldwell

I'd say we know the reality of Free Will ahead of more or less anything else. Any philosophy that leads us to deny it or even doubt it is therefore an almighty con. We know that we choose, as first order knowledge. Our knowledge of the world outside of ourselves is of a much more dubious kind, let alone theories about induction, the Scientific Method and the like. The strange thing is, though, that our power of Free Will includes whether to believe in the reality of Free Will. It is indeed salutary to look clearly at how widespread denial, among the intelligentsia at least, has worked out, in dreadful ways, in human history. -- Richard Drake

Just spotted a spelling error. I also thought on re-reading that this was written in a hurry, over-concise and can be criticised in a number of ways. But this connection between the historical insights of Berlin and Pearse has also felt like most important I've made from my reading during the first four years of Why. Feel free therefore - a joke that's worth repeating, just this once.