Some readers may feel that there is a serious omission in this volume: a discussion of whether or not animals are true agents and the extent of any freedom they may have. There are several reasons for not engaging with this controversial topic. The first is that my central purpose has been to defend the possibility of human freedom. The second is that many of the arguments around animal freedom are empirical and draw on contested interpretations of their behaviour. The third is that the topic of animal versus human consciousness and behaviour is one I have discussed elsewhere at some length. In a range of books, I have highlighted what I believe to be a huge gap between ourselves and other living creatures, even our nearest primate kin.1 While I believe it is clear that other animals do not seem to be free to the extent, or in the manner, that we are, a few words on the question of whether they have any freedom of the kind that we have discussed seem justified.

In this book have argued that human freedom is rooted in the following characteristics of our human being:

• 1. A consciousness marked by full-blown and shared intentionality;

• 2. The intentions, beliefs, desires, hopes, reasons, and envisaged goals that lie at the heart of actions;

• 3. The ability to entertain and share explicit possibilities;

• 4. Tensed time, with a developed sense of the future informed by an explicit past;

• 5. And, growing out of this, an ability – whose most sophisticated expression is the discovery and exploitation of the laws of nature – to approach the material world from an ever-expanding outside offset from what-is.

It might seem to follow from this that genuine agency is unique to human beings. While it seems likely that the consciousness of higher animals has some intentionality, it is not developed in the way it is in humans, not the least because of the absence of the kind of communication that fills our human days. We do not have direct evidence on this issue, but it seems reasonable to suppose that, for example, beliefs, knowledge, and thoughts, the holistic spaces created out of them, that are central to agency, are not present in animals, or not to anything like the degree they are present in humans.