A chauffeur, a mercenary, and an amateur Egyptologist drag themselves into an ancient temple. The venerated deity says, “What’ll you have, death or servitude?”

Not much of a choice, is it? Like getting mugged or, say, paying taxes, Marc Specter’s options in this situation are not what he or any of his dissociative personalities would’ve freely chosen. To the credit of Moon Knight’s writing, however, his alter, Stephen Grant, acknowledges that Khonshu, the Egyptian moon god in question, is only manipulating him.

Not forcing. Not possessing. Not overriding his free will. Manipulating. In the end, despite the limited options, Marc’s choice to become Khonshu’s avatar is voluntary. All our actions, even those we’d like to write off to coercion or unsound mind, are voluntary. While our autonomic systems do limited tasks without our conscious consent, everything else we do is firmly in our control and no one else’s.

It’s a tough pill to swallow, but necessary for the concept of responsibility to carry any water. If the conditions that precede our actions don’t determine them, this holds across the board, whether our decisions are difficult or easy, whether they bring us prosperity or ruin, whether they save or damn our souls. Contending that we are only in control of our decisions to the point that we can control our options is ultimately an adherence to predestination rather than free will.

Even the staunchest advocates for autonomy often bristle at this conclusion, making it all the more curious that a show with a protagonist who is regularly blacking out would put such emphasis on the importance of choice. When they’re not vying for the affection of, Layla, Marc’s wife, Stephen and Marc are bickering through reflective surfaces for control of their shared body. Neither would consider himself entirely behind the wheel. Perhaps this subordination is the reason they both fight so hard to thwart the efforts of Arthur Harrow, the show’s antagonist, to resurrect Ammit.

Apparently some time between the third kingdom and her imprisonment, the Devourer was promoted to Anubis’ old gig as judge of souls. In her absence, Harrow is carrying out on a small scale her program of judging individuals who will choose evil before they do so. Whether or not a person has yet committed an act of evil, if Ammit deems their scales unbalanced, Harrow will preemptively exact her sentence of death. Whatever sins Ammit supposedly holds against mankind, they can’t be entered into evidence if, though, they don’t actually exist.

“The reality,” C.S.Lewis wrote of free will, is “in the act itself.” A supernatural entity’s foreknowledge of a choice is one thing, but we never know what route we’ll take until we’re faced with the choice itself. Without such knowledge, Lewis points out, the path “cannot be said to have [been] chosen.” One need not resort to fictitious analogs of textbook prejudice to understand the dangers of taking choices as forgone conclusions.

Real world laws frequently hold people accountable for wrongs they’ve yet to commit. Do you have over a certain weight of marijuana, scales, and sandwich bags? Intent to sell. Driving with have a BAC above .08? Driving while impaired. Do you own a firearm and have enemies who doubt your mental state? Well, that’s not considered a precrime just yet, but we’re inching closer. Some will no doubt agree with such restrictions, but a consistent application of free will reveals that, just like Ammit, such laws put the punishment before the wrong in the name of prevention.

Those for whom these instances are a bridge too far likely are not entirely consistent themselves on the matter. They’ll rail against such presumptive policies, but will see no irony then decrying taxes as theft. For them, the gun is as good as to their head. Taken for granted are all the choices by themselves–to buy a house, to buy groceries, to go to work each day, etc–and the “thief”–votes by legislatures, rulings by courts, enforcement by police–that precede any supposed robbery that have yet to been made. Like the mugger, the intentions of the latter have been made clear, though. Who in their right mind would call their bluff?

To ask this is to miss the point. Calling a bluff is a choice. Handing over your wallet, even at literal gunpoint, is a choice, to say nothing of the choices that led up to that point. Pointing a gun at someone’s head, demanding his money, and pulling the trigger. Choices all, which haven’t really been made until the moment is upon us. Choices, even when coerced, impaired, or, dare I say, made by a split personality, are always voluntary.

To treat any of those decisions as forgone is to evince little faith in freedom. To resign your own actions to that assumption is to betray freedom outright.

If freedom is always having our druthers, then none of us are free, for life is full of disappointment and compromise. If freedom is being without physical restraints, then none of us are free, for all of us are ultimately boxed in by our environment and our physiology. If freedom is a lack of interference from others, then none of us are free, for others will always have the ability to insert themselves into our lives. If, though, freedom consists of making our own choices regardless of what comes down the pike, we will always be free, for the only power with the capability of taking that from us was the one who granted it in the first place, and He’s shown time and again His determination to leave that choice in our hands.

We can tell ourselves that our hands are tied, that someone’s got us over a barrel. We can run from choices in our past for which we’re ashamed. We can choose to hide from the unpleasant aspects of life, building fictions that insulate us from the brunt of it, and play the part until it seems real. We can try to eat our cake and have it too, championing freedom when it suits our purposes but discounting it when it doesn’t.

The dissociative duo of Marc and Stephen literally embody these inconsistencies. It’s only when they stop blaming each other, realizing that they are one and the same, that they master their will. It’s only when they stop denying that their occasional deference to each other is itself a choice that their arrangement becomes an asset rather than a liability. It’s only after defeating Harrow and Ammit that they realize that they had scarcely more faith in free will than their enemies did.

As Marc stands victorious over his foe, reluctantly prepared to deliver the fatal blow, he tells himself he’ll never be free from Khonshu’s service if he doesn’t finish it. In a clever inversion of the “no better than they are” trope, Marc’s tragic past has led him to believe he is bound to his fate as a killer. His twisted perspective tells him that the only way to leave all of that behind is to kill one last time.

All of his desperation and delusion fall away like scales from his eyes with a simple reminder from Layla.

“You have a choice. You are free.”