What do you make of the claim for in order to have free will “to have acted differently”, you would need to be aware of everything influencing your actions: the environment, precise mood, other people, past experiences, etc; and be in complete control of every one of them?
It seems like this argument says it has to be an all or nothing thing: you have to be able to control EVERYTHING in your life to have libertarian free will. Maybe we would need to be the causa sui or the ultimate cause of ourselves. I think in a Thomistic framework, God would be the ultimate or primary cause of ourselves, and we would act as secondary causes.
The objector also says our desires or wants are simply a part of us that were formed from our environment and past experiences. Again he means we weren’t in complete control of the environment or the past, so we didn’t choose our wants.
IMO we have a basic desire necessarily ordered towards the universal Good, and we can contingently desire finite goods, which are compounds of good and non-good. I think we can develop wants by learning. I learned long ago, based on my influences, vanilla ice cream tastes better than chocolate. Vanilla would be deemed a finite “good” in some aspect over chocolate. Also if I could only eat insects everyday over a long period, I might grow to like that taste (deemed as a “good” means towards the end of sustenance).
I suppose we can’t control our basic desire towards the Good (God), but we can control how this Good is achieved (perhaps via moral evil deemed as some finite good).
