In Ultimate Freedom: Beyond Free Will, Keith Lehrer remarks that he was sceptical of Carl Sagan’s claim that some of our responses are controlled by the reptilian part of the brain (2024, 30). I was equally sceptical of Lehrer’s claim that reason is the hero of free choice (2024, 11). My reaction to reading about power preferences was to think that I rarely have such preferences, and that the contexts in which I do have them comprise a fairly limited and mundane part of my life. Further, I don’t think that I am unique in this respect. Lehrer’s account is very elegant; the reflexivity of the explanatory loop is a nifty solution to the vexed issue of how to make sense of agents as the source of action. But the more I read about Lehrer’s ideal of freedom under optimal conditions of choice, the more I felt that he was describing an ideal that I neither meet nor aspire to. So, what I aim to do here is to motivate why I had that reaction. I am going to talk about two kinds of choice situations—ones where I think we can appeal to character rather than deliberation and power preferences to explain the choices; and ones that I think of as “big choices” where I think there might be something that looks like deliberation, but to describe it as reason-based seems a stretch. Such choices might include but are not limited to transformative choices (cf. Paul 2014).