My concern has been with the very possibility of human freedom, not its extent; with the metaphysics of freedom rather than, for example, the local realities of political freedom or specific freedoms from certain constraints. For this reason, it may be necessary to head off a misunderstanding: I am not claiming that our freedom is boundless. On the contrary, it is subject to many restrictions.

The most basic and universal limitation arises from the fact that we do not create the most fundamental condition of our freedom: our very existence. We are the products of a universe evolving before our birth and, most crucially, of our parents’ choices – most obviously to have a child; to permit a missed period to mark the beginning of a life.

Aldous Huxley highlights a mind-stretching accident built into this choice:

And we have, in most cases, as little choice over our death as over our birth. Exercising that choice in gratuitous suicide – freely cancelling the accident of our freedom – has been claimed as the freest of all acts. But the one-off freedom to bring our freedom to an end does little to offset the limitations of our freedom.

The extent to which we can exercise our freedom, or have any freedom to exercise, between the usually unchosen limits of our lifespan is contingent on the tickets we draw in the lottery of life – our natural, chance-given gifts, our health, and on the health of our relations with others and of the political system in which we live. While we may elect to make the best of our talents, or allow them to go to waste, their direction and scale do not lie within our gift. And my capacity to do many things is dependent on circumstances I have not chosen: as certain philosophers would put it, “cans are constitutionally iffy”.

Failure to achieve our chosen goals is as much a feature of life as success. This may be less evident than it might otherwise be because we often pre-empt failure by accepting our limitations in advance of any endeavour to push against them.