Page:Ethics (Moore 1912).djvu/218

 satisfy myself that it is conclusive. They will say, namely: Granted that we often should have acted differently, if we had chosen differently, yet it is not true that we have Free Will, unless it is also often true in such cases that we could have chosen differently. The question of Free Will has been thus represented as being merely the question whether we ever could have chosen, what we did not choose, or ever can choose, what, in fact, we shall not choose. And since there is some plausibility in this contention, it is, I think, worth while to point out that here again it is absolutely certain that, in two different senses, at least, we often could have chosen, what, in fact, we did not choose; and that in neither sense does this fact contradict the principle of causality.

The first is simply the old sense over again. If by saying that we could have done, what we did not do, we often mean merely that we should have done it, if we had chosen to do it, then obviously, by saying that we could have chosen to do it, we may mean merely that we should