most of us presume that we do have free will and act accordingly, and that this belief is specifically embodied in the American political and social culture as a necessary prerequisite to the freedoms we enjoy and the responsibilities we have accepted.
Americans because of their history are much concerned with the issue of freedom, and freedom in the political sense is something most of us understand intuitively. Free will is a different matter and is more difficult to see as operating in our lives. Freedom in the usual sense means choice, and choice entails deciding how to fulfill one's sense of and obligation for responsibility. This definition fits the political realm in which we usually think about freedom. The persons living in a dictatorship have had choice taken from them. They are told what to do, what to think, how to behave. They do not choose, and they are not responsible for anything except "choosing" to accept their lot in life. The slave who accepts his or her lot in life is also acting irresponsibly--this is the one choice they make, while all other choices are taken from them. This definition of freedom in a political state involves a sense of responsibility as well as a sense of being free to make choices, but even though we may be expected to live up to our responsibilities, such an expectation does not rise to the level of determinism because we are still free to abrogate our responsibilities, however harmful and wrongheaded that might be.
John Stuart Mill gives a good account of the meaning of freedom in the political sense as well as the meaning of social responsibility in his work On Liberty, where he proposed a simple principle for determining whether society has a right to limit individual freedom, a principle based on utilitarian concepts and applicable to the individual in his or her dealings with society. that principle can be stated as follows:
The only thing of ultimate value is the happ...