Page:Ethics (Moore 1912).djvu/219

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have so chosen, if we had chosen to make the choice. And I think there is no doubt it is often true that we should have chosen to do a particular thing if we had chosen to make the choice; and that this is a very important sense in which it is often in our power to make a choice. There certainly is such a thing as making an effort to induce ourselves to choose a particular course; and I think there is no doubt that often if we had made such an effort, we should have made a choice, which we did not in fact make.

And besides this, there is another sense in which, whenever we have several different courses of action in view, it is possible for us to choose any one of them; and a sense which is certainly of some practical importance, even if it goes no way to justify us in saying that we have Free Will. This sense arises from the fact that in such cases we can hardly ever know for certain beforehand, which choice we actually shall make; and one of the commonest senses of the word “possible” is that in which we call an event “possible” when no man can know for certain that it will not happen. It