In this book, Susan Wolf charts a course between incompatibilism, or the notion that freedom and responsibility require casual and metaphysical independence from the impersonal forces of nature, and compatibilism, or the notion that people are free and responsible as long as their actions are governed by their desires. Wolf argues that some of the forces which are beyond our control are friends to freedom rather than enemies of it, enabling us to see the world for what it is. The freedom we want is not independence from the world, but independence from the forces that prevent us from choosing how to live in the light of a sufficient appreciation of the world.

Susan Rose Wolf is an American moral philosopher and philosopher of action who is currently the Edna J. Koury Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She taught previously at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland and Harvard University. Susan Wolf works chiefly in ethics and its close relations in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, political philosophy, and aesthetics. Her interests range widely over moral psychology, value theory, and normative ethics.

She is the author of The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning & Love (Oxford, 2015), Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton, 2010), Freedom Within Reason (Oxford, 1990), and is co-editor, with Christopher Grau, of Understanding Love: Philosophy, Film, and Fiction (Oxford, 2014). Her articles include “Asymmetrical Freedom,” The Journal of Philosophy (1980); “The Importance of Free Will,” Mind (1981); “Moral Saints,” The Journal of Philosophy (1982); “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility,” Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions, ed. by Schoeman (1987); “Morality and Partiality,” Philosophical Perspectives (1992); “Meaning and Morality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1997); “Happiness and Meaning: Two Aspects of the Good Life,” Social Philosophy & Policy(1997); “The Meanings of Lives,“ in Perry, Bratman, Firscher, eds.,Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings(2007); “Moral Psychology and the Unity of the Virtues,” Ratio (2007); and “Moral Obligations and Social Commands,” in Metaphysics and the Good: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Merrihew Adams, ed. by Newlands and Jorgensen, eds., (2009).