There can be few more dispiriting ideas than that our freedom is an illusion. I can testify to this when, as a teenager, I was assailed from time to time by the terrible thought that my behaviour, and indeed my whole life, might be predetermined by forces and circumstances which were not of my choosing.

The claim that we have no control over the contents of our lives requires little by way of detailed or sophisticated argument. The man in the pub or the woman on the Clapham omnibus will remind you that actions are physical events. As such, they must be the result of prior causes and subject to the laws of nature that, by definition, admit of no exception. The difference between mere happenings and human doings is therefore apparent rather than real. It must also follow that choice is an illusion since, at any given time, there is only one future. Jenann Ismael (who does not share this view) expressed it thus: “As you toss and turn in the throes of a difficult decision, there is really only one possible outcome. You are no freer to choose otherwise, than water is to flow uphill”.

Like many, perhaps most, determinists my teenage self did not consistently embrace the consequences of his belief. After all, he took pride in some of his achievements – sufficient to let them occasionally slip out in the conversation – and he did not hesitate to pass judgement on himself and, more often, on others. In practice, he regarded humans, for the most part, as moral agents responsible for their actions.

The theoretical impossibility of free will is, it seems, difficult to accept in practice. Arguments leading to conclusions that no-one seems to take seriously may appear to the busy world to condemn philosophy as lacking true seriousness – a fault that may seem more reprehensible in a world engulfed, as it is at the time of writing, in a pandemic. Not as irritating as, say, Zeno's paradoxes demonstrating that motion, and indeed any sort of change, is not possible, but nevertheless bad enough.