Tamler: So the question is: is it possible that our natures are flexible enough that—after due reflection—this commitment to free will and DMR [deep moral responsibility] can be softened, or even eliminated?

Galen: I think this question may be the only really interesting question left in the free will debate, because the answers to the rest are really pretty clear by now...

...Given that the experience of DMR is seemingly inevitable in our everyday life, can we shake free of it, can we at least diminish it, can we somehow truly live, breathe the impossibility of DMR, and not just accept it in a merely theoretical context? And is the inevitability of the experience of DMR just a local human fact, a human peculiarity or limitation, or is it going to be inevitable for any possible cognitively sophisticated, rational, self-conscious agent that faces Oxfam-box-type choices and is fully aware of the fact that it does so?

Well, I’m not sure. But I think that perhaps it’s not inevitable for human beings, and here I have a couple more quotations I like. The Indian mystical thinker Krishnamurti reports that the experience of radical choice simply fades away when you advance spiritually: ‘you do not choose’, he says, ‘you do not decide, when you see things very clearly.. Only the unintelligent mind exercises choice in life’. A spiritually advanced or ‘truly intelligent mind simply cannot have choice’, because it ‘can … only choose the path of truth’. ‘Only the unintelligent mind has free will’ — by which he means experience of radical free will.

Galen Strawson