In the debate between determinists and compatibilists it is often repeated that the side arguing that free will and determinism are compatible are just playing word games, and changing the definition of "free will". However, it's probably the other way around. When the debate is first framed in philosophy 101 classes it causes people enter into a sort of confusion about what they had previously believed. It's hard to get at what people's pre-theoretical notions of freedom are, but we can certainly observe that no audience has ever gasped in shock like Marty does in this comic upon "learning" that people behave deterministically, and only by altering their environment would you alter their decisions. In fact, this is the basic premise of all time travel movies, and people find it so obvious that it never has to be explained. If the director wanted people to find it disconcerting that they supposed have no "free will", a large explanation would have to take place in order to get the audience to understand. Likewise, if the director wanted to depict the so call "libertarian" view of free will, that is that we are "truly" free and our souls or consciousness can make decisions outside of physics, the audience would also demand an explanation. I suspect that most people, upon learning that the mere act of going back in time and observing themselves again, might find themselves making different decisions for no apparent reason, would feel like they were less free. After all, if my decision to get married was based not on the kind of person I am, nor on the environment, but on something else entirely that can oscillate back and forth "freely", I might feel like the fact that I'm currently married wasn't so much my choice, but merely chance.
What concerns people about freedom in movies, it seems, is whether or not the action came from ourselves rather than a foreign object, not whether or not our decisions are somehow able to take place outside of the "laws of physics" (a strange idea to be sure, since the laws of physics merely describe what exists in reality, so whatever occurs in reality must be under them, i.e. it is definitionally true that nothing can break the laws of physics, because if they did we would just revise the laws to accomadate for this new information). While people do not react with horror that we make the same decisions every time, they probably would react with horror if a sci-fi movie shows that our decisions are secretly being made by a computer chip implanted in our brains without our knowledge. No one worries that the computer chip is deterministic, merely that it is not part of our being. The compatibilist account of free will, which seems to be taken for granted in time travel stories, is that freedom simply is having what we are be in control of our decisions.

Board games rules are based on a fundamental mistake about the nature of fun.

"What did you bring again, Marx?"
"I brought the cake."
"I thought Engels brought that."
"Uh...it's from both of us."

Early capitalist theorists like Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer believe that under free market systems, individuals would pursue their own selfish needs, but through market exchange and competition, society as a whole would benefit. Adam Smith, being an economist, focused on how trade and competition would set prices in a way that reflected the value of the work put into producing goods, and the society's desire for any given good. For example, if society was producing too much wheat, and not enough sugar, a capitalist would notice that with the same amount of labor he could switch to growing sugar and make more money, because the price of sugar would be higher relative to how much you could produce with the same amount of work. Through the selfish desire to make more money, labor would be allocated in a way that would correctly reflect what a society's wants and needs were. Herbert Spencer was more of a sociologist, and focused on how competing firms would either die out or prosper based on how good they were at what they were doing. So for two competing sugar farms, if one was inefficient, lazy, or incompetent, and the other was well run, the incompetent one wouldn't be able to survive in a market economy and would close down. He saw this as a good thing, because then society as a whole would evolve in a similar way to organisms over time, towards better and better practices, due to the free market "killing off" weaker, more poorly managed companies. He coined the term "survival of the fittest", and thought a free market system was what would improve society in this way.
Thomas Hobbes is best known for his social contract theory, where he argued that we must submit to the rule of law (even to a monarch) in order to prevent an "all against all" society, essentially giving up some degree of freedom for the security of living in a society. People like Rousseau argued that before advanced civilization people lived in relative peace because we are naturally cooperative, and Adam Smith thought that our natural moral sentiments, which are grounded in the discomfort we would feel in knowing a neutral third party observer would disapprove of our bad actions, is what keeps people behaving justly.

Serious historical question though, no joke: did Hegel have groupies?

"Imagine, the universe is going to recur eternally over and over again, and you will somehow never get any less stupid."

What if being a Utilitarian makes you sad? We should probably kill all the Utilitarians just to be safe.

A lot of the critiques of Utilitarianism, the doctrine that we should try to create a world that maximizes happiness, point out the bizarre and inhuman actions that we would seemingly have to accept if we accepted the theory. For example, we can imagine that if we wanted to maximize happiness, it would be morally justified, and perhaps even required, to murder and healthy person and harvest their organs in order to save five people. After all, five lives are more valuable than one, so even if it doesn't seem like justice, we should kill one person to save the five. However, as the comic points out, you don't even need to get five people involved. It seems as though a single happy person is intrinsically "worth" more than a sad one, so we should even kill one person who is sad to save one that is happy. All in all, utilitarianism usually sounds great when people first hear about it, and the theory really only suffers from one minor flaw - no one wants to live in a world where we actually believe it is true.