Megell Strayhorn
Period: 7
Goldberg/ Philosophy/ Free Will Essay/ Autumn 2014
11-17-14
To answer the question if human beings possess free will successfully, you have to understand what ‘free will’ actually means. Free will is having the the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate. The ability to act on one 's own desires. There are a couple different ways of answering the free will question that get broken down into three main beliefs; Compatibilism, Libertarianism, and Determinism. Libertarians believe that humans are capable of possessing free will. Determinists believe that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to will. They believe that human beings are not morally responsible
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Hogan). If we are not free to do so then there is no point in our existence as a whole because sinning would be a concept outside of our control. The teachings of Jesus are based on the fact that we can freely choose at all times. For example, if we are asked to repent then we’re obviously free to choose whether to repent or not. If we apply the Libertarianism view to this question then it is simple to understand that human beings would be considered completely free. To say that humans are completely free is wrong because there’s no way that everything we do is one hundred percent up to us. There are many different background causes that we don’t even think about when we’re about to make a certain decision. For example, if someone is debating whether to run through the yellow light or slow down, you might not go through it if last time the light changed to red and you got a ticket. The decision was determined by previous decisions that you made. Even though you might think that you had a number of different options, they weren’t really options. You were bound to do exactly what you did in that …show more content…
Hard determinists believe that all actions and decisions are determined by a number of different causes. Every single mental event, choice, intention, decision, and our actions are no more than an effect of other equally necessitated event (Hondereich). For example, when you choose what to wear in the morning it’s affected by many different factors like society and what’s in style, the weather, if you’re religiously affiliated, and other things as well. Scientific evidence for this claim is tied to Isaac Newton 's Theory of Relativity that mentions that for every action there are positive and or negative outcomes. In a sense this is similar to the hard determinist theory. Our actions vary from wants, wishes, and motivations, which basically are caused by specific conditions as mentioned earlier. Freud stated that the factors such as wants and wishes are the result of psychological conditioning and that our suppressed feelings produced by the human psyche (Id, Ego and Super ego) come together uncontrollably later in life effecting all actions and decisions you will
There is much debate over the issue of whether we have complete freedom of the will or if our will caused by something other than our own choosing. There are three positions adopted by philosophers regarding this dispute: determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism. Determinists believe that freedom of the will does not exist. Since actions are events that have some predetermined cause, no actions can be chosen and thus there is no will to choose. The compatibilist argues that you can have both freedom of the will and determinism. If the causes which led to our actions were different, then we could have acted in another way which is compatible with freedom of the will. Libertarians believe that freedom of the will does exist.
Human beings always believe that what they want to do is ‘up to them,' and on this account, they take the assumption that they have free will. Perhaps that is the case, but people should investigate the situation and find a real case. Most of the intuitions may be correct, but still many of them can be incorrect. There are those who are sceptical and believe that free will is a false illusion and that it only exists in the back of people’s minds, but society should be able to distinguish feelings from beliefs in order to arrive at reality and truth.
The argument of free will and determinism is a very complex argument. Some might say we have free will because we are in control; we have the ability to make our own choices. Others might say it’s in our biological nature to do the things we do; it’s beyond our control. Basically our life experiences and choices are already pre determined and there’s nothing we can do to change it. Many philosophers have made very strong arguments that support both sides.
The question of whether people can choose their thoughts and actions or not has been a topic many great thinkers throughout history have thought about. Yet, despite countless arguments for and against it, no one has been able to prove whether free will exists or not. Free will is the ability to make a choice not determined by outside stimuli. The opposite of free will is determinism. Hard determinists argue that there is no such thing as free will; people don’t have the ability to choose freely, undetermined from outside stimuli. Yet despite many compelling arguments for the case, hard determinism disregards the unique quality of humanity. Humanity has the ability to think and reason, which ultimately gives them the unique attribute of agent-causation.
Choices that people make have a giant place in their lives. Most of us consider that we do these choices freely, that we have free will to make these choices. The point that most of us miss is free will is not simple as is it looks like. When one makes choices doesn’t he consider that what would that choices lead him to? Therefore does he make those choices for his benefits or his desires to make those choices? Does the environment push him to make those choices or does he have the free will to ignore his own environment? Philosopher and writes splits around those questions. There is different thesis, beliefs about free will. Some say that we are conditioned from birth with qualities of our personality, social standing and attitudes. That we do not have free will, our choices shapes up by the world we born in to. Some others believe that we born as a blank paper we could shape by the occasions or choices that we make freely. Marry Midgley on her article “Freedom and Heredity” defends that without certain limitations for instance our talents, capacities, natural feelings we would not need to use free will. 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.
The last few weeks of class we covered several different kinds of determinism from the various handouts we received. The hard determinist believe that everything happens in a causal fashion, that there is no free will and everything is predetermined. “We remember statements about human beings being pawns of their environment, victims of conditions beyond their control, the result of causal influences stemming from parents, etc.”1 These hard determinist think that the universe works like a clock. Everything has a causal effect onto the other and there is no free will or choice, that all the tiny variables added up to you making that choice. Hospers dives into the psychology and says that every choice you make is a predetermined factor
In the world of Philosophy, there is a reoccurring argument that takes several sides: Can we be free even if the future is determined by the past? The question of freedom does affect ones way of life, which philosophers help reconstruct the there premises that show the problem of free will.
The power of acting without necessity and acting on one’s own discretions, free will still enamors debates today, as it did in the past with philosophers Nietzsche, Descartes, and Hume. There are two strong opposing views on the topic, one being determinism and the other “free will”. Determinism, or the belief a person lacks free will and all events including human actions are determined by forces outside the will of an individual contrasts the entire premise of free will. Rene Descartes formulates his philosophical work through deductive reasoning and follows his work with his system of reasoning. David Hume analyzes philosophical questions with inductive reasoning and skeptism with a strong systematic order. Neither a systematic philosopher nor a rigid thinker, Nietzsche offers his own nihilistic spin on the topic of free will. The three different approaches of free will by Nietzsche, Hume, and Descartes all obtain their strong suits as well as their pitfalls. Nietzsche insists free will is created by theologians and therefore denies its existence, while Descartes embraces free will, and Hume individualizes the meaning of free will.
The most inclusive perspective on free will, compatibilism, combines ideas of determinism and free will, claiming that although we do have the freedom of will and choice, our past experiences define our judgement and therefore our will. (McKenna) Determinists who disagree with the first part, free will, in compatibilism, agree with the later statement, that experiences playing a defining role in our will. In his book, “Between Chance and Choice: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Determinism” author Robert Bishop states the principle of deter...
Determinism currently takes two related forms: hard determinism and soft determinism [1][1]. Hard determinism claims that the human personality is subject to, and a product of, natural forces. All of our choices can be accounted for by reference to environmental, social, cultural, physiological and hereditary (biological) causes. Our total character is a product of these environmental, social, cultural, physiological and hereditary forces, thus our beliefs, desires, values and habits are all outside of our control. The hard determinist, therefore, claims that our choices are determined by these factors; free will is an illusion because the choices and decisions we make are derived from our character, which is completely out of our control in creating. An example might help illustrate this point. Consider a man who has just repeatedly stabbed another man outside of a bar; the other man is dead. The hard determinist would argue that there were factors outside of the killer’s control which led him to this action. As a child, he was constantly beaten by his father and was the object of ridicule and contempt of his classmates. This trend of hard luck would continue all his life. Coupled with the fact that he has a gene that has been identified with male aggression, he could not control himself when he pulled the knife out and started stabbing the other man. All this aggression, and all this history were the determinate cause of his action.
The idea that one event causes another and so on is so common in everyday life that we have become accustomed to it. Hard determinism takes the very strict stance that every event is determined by a unique set of conditions and acts according to the physical laws of nature. Soft determinism also defends the causal approach of hard determinism unlike indeterminism, which, on the other hand, refutes the principle of causality entirely. The hard determinist notion of causality is very rigid and stems largely from the thinking of classical mechanics. It implies that with all of the proper information it would be possible to calculate and predict some future event with certainty. For example, if one were to analyze drug addiction from the stance of hard determinism then biochemical imbalances in the brain and physical dependency on the drug are what cause addiction. In other words, addiction is due to physical conditions both pre-existing and transient in the addict’s
Hard determinism is a problem for moral judgment because hard determinism says that a person is not held responsible for their actions and therefore does not allow free will. Our moral judgement is our decision between right and wrong but with hard determinism you aren’t held responsible for your wrong actions. This is causing a problem for moral judgement because we aren’t responsible for our wrong actions because our decisions cannot cause our action. Also is saying that “human freedom and determinism is not compatible” to one another. The textbook says that hard determinists believe that “we can only barely be said to be ‘acting’ at
Determinism is the theory that everything is caused by antecedent conditions, and such things cannot be other than how they are. Though no theory concerning this issue has been entirely successful, many theories present alternatives as to how it can be approached. Two of the most basic metaphysical theories concerning freedom and determinism are soft determinism and hard determinism.
Since the foundation of philosophy, every philosopher has had some opinion on free will in some sense, from Aristotle to Kant. Free will is defined as the agent's action to do something unimpeded, with many other factors going into it Many philosophers ask the question: Do humans really have free will? Or is consciousness a myth and we have no real choice at all? Free will has many components and is fundamental in our day to day lives and it’s time to see if it is really there or not.
If there is no room for choice or chance then everything happens without an individuals responsibility of doing something, mean that people can not be held to their actions, because individuals are not able to chose their actions no matter how virtuous or viscous they may be, as all their actions are all already predetermined. The idea of hard determinism refutes the idea of if-then statements because human choices and actions are not taken into factor because under hard determinism humans are not responsible for our actions. Hard determinism received its greatest influence from the physicist Isaac Newton, and his studies in physics and his idea of the universe as “matter in motion”. People who believe in Newton’s “matter in motion” theory who also believe in hard determinism applied the idea to everything in the universe, that everything is just matter in motion including humans, who need to obey the laws of nature just as anything else needs