I think that, as pointed out by others, this ultimately comes down to your definition of “choice”. But I also think that Jodi is being unfair in treating Nightime as though s/he were obstinately refusing to see reason. His/her position seems to me to be entirely reasonable. Let me admit right now, though, that I have not yet looked at the other thread where this discussion began. Perhaps this will allow me to see the issue with greater clarity, since I won’t be distracted by the other issues being discussed in that thread. Or perhaps I’m just lazy. Anyway, just to throw my own dog into the ring, as it were, I submit the following analogy.
Suppose that I run a nightclub. Every night, I admit many patrons, many of whom are regulars. But every night some of my costumers get a little too rowdy, and start causing trouble. They throw their drinks, intimidate the other costumers, and generally make things unpleasant, until I throw them out. Of course, I refuse to admit these particular trouble-makers on following nights, but I get a lot of new costumers every night, and on any given night, some of my costumers will choose to by trouble-makers, while others will choose to behave themselves. Let us suppose further that, by whatever definition of “choice” that you use, the costumers choose freely to be, or not to be, trouble-makers.
Then, one day, I am given, by my uncle the inventor, a wonderful gadget: a Trouble-Maker Detector (TMD). The TMD (my uncle says) can scan the brain of a person and instantly state whether that person will be a trouble-maker that night. I give it to the bouncer at the front door to my club, and he scans every patron before admitting them, though the costumers are not aware of the TMD’s existence.
Now, at first I’m skeptical of my uncle’s invention. Though the TMD is telling me that some of the people will be touble-makers, I am not yet sufficiently confident in its results to risk losing costumers by refusing to admit them. I do, however, note who they are, and, sure enough, these people often become trouble-makers later that night. Moreover, all of the people whom the machine said would not become trouble-makers, in fact do not become trouble-makers. In other words, though the TMD occasionally gives false positives, it never gives a false negative.
Over the course of several nights, as I become more and more confident in the results of my uncle’s gadget, I start admitting fewer and fewer of the people to whom the TMD gives a positive result, indicating that they may be trouble-makers. Finally, after a few nights, I am completely confident in the machine, and only admit those whom the TMD indicates will be non-trouble-makers.
Now, if I understand Jodi’s reasoning correctly, those people who enter my club no longer behave themselves by choice at this point. Rather, once they’ve entered the club, they are compelled to be good, because were they to choose otherwise, well, then they would not have been admitted in the first place.
Recall that many of my costumers are regulars. These regulars always behaved themselves, even before I got my TMD, and did so (we hypothesized) of their own free will. My question is, when precisely did these regulars’ good behavior stop being their own choice? Was it when I first began scanning patrons with the gadget? Was it when I first began refusing to admit some of the people to whom the TMD gave a positive result? Or was it when I finally refused to admit anyone to whom the TMD gave a positive result?
It seems to me that my regulars never stopped making a free choice. Every night they make the same choice to behave themselves, of their own free will. The presence or absence of others who might, or might not, choose otherwise has no bearing on whether or not a given one of my regulars used free will in deciding to behave himself.
Now suppose that, unbeknownst to me, the back door to my nightclub occasionally remains unlocked, and some of the people who are turned away at the front door (because of a positive TMD reading) sneak into the nightclub through the back. As it turns out, these people who sneak in never actually cause trouble, so I am never aware of the fact that people are entering my club without being cleared by the TMD. Does the presence of these people somehow return free will to my regular patrons? If so, why does merely having these “illegal” costumers in the room grant free will to the others? If not, why then did my regulars have free will before I started refusing people at the front door, but no longer have free will now?
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