# Free Will Is a Red Herring > A man can do what he wants, but he can’t want what he wants. > > [[Schopenhauer|Schopenhauer]] Since needing to want what you want to have free will would imply the need to also want what you’d want to want, this argument implies an infinite regress and is therefore self defeating. It seems perfectly fine to me to define free will as the ability to do what you want, which it is completely reasonable to say we have almost as a tautology, how could you do anything you don’t want (in the philosophical meaning of ultimately motivated) to do? Ethically a lack of freedom or presence of freedom means very little. You don’t need the perpetrator to be free to kill for you to desire their retributive punishment nor for society to rather restoratively rehabilitate them. What’s far more important is the [[Existentialism|Existentialist]] concept of freedom in which we are terrified not of our lack of free will but our radical freedom to do anything in our understanding of bad faith. We all feel this very viscerally. - [ ] continue this thought