Compatibilism Essay

The belief that our realities are a result of various determined factors, such as the environment around us, is especially rational. Even though determinism exists, it does not rule out responsibility and freedom. The view that people choose to act independently out of free will only goes so far. Often, violence or other external factors are the root of various human behavior. When this happens, the event is not caused by something in the person, but rather a predetermined factor.

Are we as humans truly free? This is a question that many individuals often wonder about their freedom even though there is this common sense that we just are. Though we feel like we are free and think that we have the choice to make the decisions we do, and that everything that has occurred is because of our decisions, does this verify that we are in fact free? Are we bound by nature and its functioning? Or rather do we have freedom, yet everything is still at the same time determined?

Therefore, we are still morally responsible for our actions even though determinism is present during our decision making. In this instance, human beings would be considered free to a certain extent yet not entirely. In conclusion, to be capable of answering this question we must have decided upon our own interpretation of what it is to be free. If we are Libertarian we believe in ultimate free will for the entire human race, yet if we are a Hard Determinist then human beings have no freedom as everything is determined by past events, and if we believe in religious Predestination then God has already made the deciding choices in our lives. Therefore, an answer may only be relevant to those whom share the same opinion: Freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be

The compatibilist theory is that, the actions we devise can be both free and determined at the same given time. Most people who are unfamiliar with philosophical literature, are probably wondering how this is so, without being a contradiction. The key is to learn the distinction between the two and to understand how some actions are free

Those limitations lead us to use free will and make choices freely. She continues without our limitations we do not need to use free will. Free will needs to be used according to our needs but when mentioning need not as our moral need as our needs to what could we bring up with our capacities. We need to use our free will without stereotypes. Furthermore free will should be shaped by the choice that would lead us good consequences.

Will is the ability to choose to act or not to act while reason is the mental capacity that informs the will of the appropriate action. Libertarian and do not believe in Determinism but in free will. This can also bring us to indeterminism which states that all human actions are not so much determined by the preceding events, condition, causes or karma as by deliberate choice of free will. Indeterminist do not have to deny that causes exists but instead

We take freedom for granted, even though in some countries it is not so trivial. It is not enough to feel that freedom is our basic right, but to understand why it is so important, and why freedom can not be replaced by the specific ends one might think it is means to. I will argue, that freedom does have independent value. First I will talk about the non-independent value of freedom, and look at the different independent values, then concentrate on the non-specific instrumental value. I am going to look at claims where Dworkin and Kymlicka were wrong, and evaluate Ian Carter’s standpoint.

The first point he makes is that people want to be free and they believe that to be undetermined is to be free. He states that the most simple way to view determinism is to hold the idea that since it says everything we do is predetermined, then we do not in fact have free will. He claims that people think this way about determinism because they wish to connect decision making with human feelings. When we chose to do simple things like wave our arm, we claim that we did it because we felt like it, not because an outside force caused us to. Blanshard make a good point that we should not rely on human emotion to determine if we have free will or not.

The court system seems to think that by using public shaming a criminal will not do the crime again. In some cases that may work but in other cases the criminal will continue to do crimes. Public shaming will not solve any of the issues in society that creates criminal nor will it decrease crime rates. Criminals will not stop committing crimes because they are put to shame in the public eye. In fact criminals who are shamed in the public will probably commit more crimes now that they are labeled as criminals.

This paper contributes to the free will debate by defending the position of compatibilism as the most valid solution. The debate of the free will of humans relates to the seeming incompatibility between determinism and human free will. Compatibilism is the idea that determinism is compatible and consistent with free will. This debate ties into the topics of moral responsibility, and I will defend my argument that freedom and moral responsibility are compatible even with determinism. My main argument consists of the fact that “free will” means that a human being could have selected another option if they wished to do so, meaning they could have responsibility for their actions even if determinism is true.