Feeling Free

Jonathan Gingerich uses examples from literature and song to introduce a kind of freedom he calls “spontaneous freedom.” He argues that spontaneous freedom is central to our ordinary talk of freedom but overlooked by the philosophical literature on free will, which focuses on a kind of freedom that is constitutively moral. I argue that spontaneous freedom is the standard kind of freedom, the constitutively moral kind. What is distinctive about Gingerich’s examples is not that they involve a new kind of freedom but that they involve an agent feeling their freedom. This supports a different take about their significance.