[MD] Free Will

[X Acto]

"It is, again, the capacity for choice that makes us accountable for 
our own actions and states. Epictetus is particularly fond of 
exploring the implications of this essentially Stoic conception. 
In studying his usage it is helpful to remember that his favored 
term prohairesis refers more often to the capacity for choice than 
it does to particular acts of choosing. The word is variously 
translated; the rendering “volition” is adopted here as in Long 2002.
The volition, Epictetus argues, is “by nature unimpeded” (1.17.21), 
and it is for this reason that freedom is for him an inalienable 
characteristic of the human being. The very notion of a capacity 
to make one's own decisions implies as a matter of logical necessity 
that those decisions are free of external compulsion; otherwise they 
would not be decisions. But humans do have such a capacity and are 
thus profoundly different from even the higher animals, which deal 
with impressions merely in an unreflective way (2.8).
It is the volition that is the real person, the true self of the 
individual. Our convictions, attitudes, intentions and actions 
are truly ours in a way that nothing else is; they are determined 
solely by our use of impressions and thus internal to the sphere of 
volition. The appearance and comfort of one's body, one's possessions, 
one's relationships with other people, the success or failure of 
one's projects, and one's power and reputation in the world are all 
merely contingent facts about a person, features of our experience 
rather than characteristics of the self. These things are all 
“externals”; that is, things external to the sphere of volition."

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