Letter: Perfectly free choice could only be the throw of a die

From Luce Gilmore, Cambridge, UK

Richard Webb notes a connection between “agency” and thorny concepts like free will (15 February, p 34). The problem of free will vanishes once it is accepted to be illusory.

Webb details his decision not to adopt a puppy, listing internal, external and historical considerations that influenced it. This is always the way: agency is contingent. Choices may be good or bad, but a perfectly free choice could only be random.

It would be like binding oneself to the outcome of a dice-throw, as in that dreadful old hound The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart, in which a psychoanalyst stakes everything on the throw of a die.