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„Proponents of many popular compatibilist arguments often agree in rejecting contra-causal or magical free will.

Yet they seem to be trying, at all costs, to rescue some snippet of freedom from the obvious fact that everything that happens in this universe is either caused by something that went before or is a truly random event.

Neither of these alternatives provides any room for what most people would call free will.

Of course human beings make choices. I am not denying this. Nor am I denying that we can be more or less constrained in the choices available to us, nor that we can be held responsible for some choices and not others.

But we should not confuse the decision making powers of a living creature with freedom of the will. This, it seems to me, has caused a lot of confusion.

For example, Dennett’s (2003) book Freedom Evolves is a wonderful description of how humans and other animals have evolved the ability to make ever more complex choices in ever more complex environments.

But these choices are not free in the sense that most people want them to be free. They are the result of the evolved complexity of the perceptual and motor systems that Dennett so ably describes. A more apt title would therefore be Choice Evolves.“