1. Freedom and Responsibility
a study of choice by Jean-Paul Sartre

2. Freedom Comes with Consequences
What is responsibility?
consciousness (of) being the incontestable author of an event or of an object
We make the world with our choices.

3. Terms to Know
for-itself - a person; an individual who behaves according to choices which result in making them who they are; i.e., YOU.
Bad faith - refusing to make a decision instead of consciously acting on one to choose the course of one's life.
facticity - fact over which we have no control; e.g. being born.

4. Whose War is it? You deserve the war in which you have been mobilized.
2 choices:
join the war
avoid the war through suicide or desertion
You have chosen the war even if you are against it; by remaining you endorse what is happening.
Great question of existentialism: to be or not to be?

5. Choices Are Temporal
Sartre: "I am not distinct from the epoch in which I find myself."
You would not make the same choice regarding this war if you lived in a different time in which you did not have to make such a terrible choice.
"It is a waste of time to ask what I should have been..."

6. Freedom

7. Freedom Freedom is based on choice
Every situation is an opportunity that is made use of or neglected.
Hence, such situations force us to make a choice.
We are free in that we are constantly making decisions for the paths our lives will take.
We are anguished because we can never shift that responsibility onto someone else.

8. Freedom
According to Sartre, freedom means always being forced to make a choice.
So are we really free?
"You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill;
I will choose a path that's clear-
I will choose Free Will."
-Rush, 1981

9. Thanks for Listening!