III. David Hume
A. The idea that events (including human actions) can be adequately determined by immediately prior events. This is a very practical way of thinking. Using past ideas, events and reasoning to think about the future and think about the effects of those actions. Everything happens for a reason. The circumstances that led up to the event has a cause.
1. Hard determinism, the deterministic perspective is true and not compatible with human freedom, moral or otherwise. Thus, humans cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.
According to soft determinism, the deterministic perspective may be true but there are nevertheless conditions of moral freedom such that humans can, at least at times, be held morally responsible for their actions.
2. The whole reason why the princesses are sent to Qui Gong is because they want to make an alliance so strong that the Mongols would not dare to attack. This was all determined and planned out by the emperor, the three princesses father. This is an extremely practical use of marriage.
3.“To consider the matter aright, reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls, which carries us along a certain train of ideas, and endows them with particular qualities, according to their particular situations and relations. This instinct, 'tis true, arises from past observation and experience; but can anyone give the ultimate reason, why past experience and observation produces such an effect, any more than why nature alone should produce it?” - Hume
IV. Compare and Contrast the two positions.
A. I think that one of the common theme in free will and determinism is that they teach us how to live our life. It just depends on each person’s perspective on the uni...
... middle of paper ...
...y Confucianism, five relationship is prime here. The three princesses purpose was to follow their father’s orders and to marry the princes of Qui Gong. This shows a sign of filial piety, but they disobey their father’s orders and in the end loves the three escorts instead. The quote “Which should I choose duty or heart?”, Confucius would answer that and say, follow your duty. You must follow your father’s orders because that is Xiao.
VIII. Conclusion
A. Is life made by one’s own decisions or by the a system and one’s adherence to this system for pragmatic reasons?
B. Is life made by one’s own decisions or by the a system and one’s adherence to this system for pragmatic reasons?
C. I know myself the best , and I do believe that I know what is best for me because my experiences and my choices have created the person that I am today.
D. So how are we supposed to live?
Yan Zhitui states that, "women take charge of family affairs, entering into lawsuits, straightening out disagreements, and paying calls to seek favor...the government offices are filled with their fancy silks." (Differences between north and south, 111). Yet, even in the Qing dynasty women were still restricted by and expected to uphold more traditional ideals, especially in the public eye. So, in the end, through her virtue, Hsi-Liu’s two children we able to become upright. Here, there is a split between what a woman is supposed to be according to old Chinese tradition, and the realities facing women in Tancheng. The loss of her husband, and economic hardship had forced His-Liu to behave in a different way, as if she were usurping the power from the eldest son so she could teach the two boys a lesson about being good family members. While she still maintains the ideals of bearing children, and being loyal to her husband, even after he dies, out of necessity she is forced to break from Confucian ideals of being only concerned with the domestic issues. This too put her at odds with the more traditional society around her, as the villagers pitied her sons, but vilified the Hsi-Liu for being so strict with them (Woman Wang, 65). Had she remarried, she would have been looked down upon even more because she would had broken her duty to remain faithful to her deceased
However, this “ladder of success” was not as simple as it seemed. First of all, the class of both families will be a huge barrier. We are not even talking about freedom to love here, there is no such thing in late imperial China. Although we can’t say that love doesn’t exist even in such systems, such as Shen Fu and Chen Yun, but most marriages are not about love. Rather, it was about exchange of values. For example, when two families want to become business partners, the parents of the family will have their son and daughter married, so the two families will have closer bonding which made the business much easier. In this sense, we can see that the couple is simply a tool. In the same sense, the families which has not much “values” can only have marriages with the same class of families. Meaning for a women to climb up the ladder of success is not quite possible as the class of her family is a huge deciding factor for marriage in the
“There is a continuum between free and unfree, with many or most acts lying somewhere in between.” (Abel, 322) This statement is a good summation of how Nancy Holmstrom’s view of free will allows for degrees of freedom depending on the agent’s control over the situation. Holmstrom’s main purpose in her Firming Up Soft Determinism essay was to show that people can have control over the source of their actions, meaning that people can have control over their desires and beliefs, and because of this they have free will. She also tried to show that her view of soft determinism was compatible with free will and moral responsibility. While Holmstrom’s theory about the self’s being in control, willingness to participate, and awareness of an act causes the act to be free, has some merit, her choice to incorporate soft determinism ultimately proved to invalidate her theory.
In life we are constantly questioning why people act the way they do. A determinist would say that freedom of choice couldn’t always be possible because our actions are determined by things that are way beyond our control. This view is known as the most extreme form of determinism; hard determinism. A hard determinist would believe there is no free will it’s an illusion everything is determined. Everything happens because of physical laws, which govern the universe. Whether or not we do well in life is far beyond our control. We may seem to have a choice but in reality we don’t. We shouldn’t blame people or praise people it wasn’t their choice. We are helpless and blind from start to finish. We don’t have any moral responsibilities. Some causes that are put forth by determinist are human nature; which means people are born with basic instincts that influence how they act. Another is environmental influence, which simply means people are shaped by their environment conditioned by their experience to be the kind of people they are. Also, social dynamics, which mean’s social creatures that are influenced by social force around them and psychological forces, which is people, are governed by psychological forces.
...world gives us, or do we form our own? For each of us, our binary opposite choices will be slightly different, but we will encounter them for the rest of our lives. We must determine early what our choice will be, so that when these choices do come, our answers will be determined by the matrix we have created. It is when we are comfortable with the reality we have defined that we pass to the upper levels of mental cognition and self-awareness. Whether it is choosing the person we are going to marry, deciding what our career will be, or finding a religion that we feel is right, we must choose the matrix that we have built on our own thoughts and interpretations. Only then will we know ourselves, and feel that we have made the best decisions for our lives and our system of existence.
...e between reliance on others to make one happy and one's own efforts for self-fulfillment.
Kingston uses the story of her aunt to show the gender roles in China. Women had to take and respect gender roles that they were given. Women roles they had to follow were getting married, obey men, be a mother, and provide food. Women had to get married. Kingston states, “When the family found a young man in the next village to be her husband…she would be the first wife, an advantage secure now” (623). This quote shows how women had to get married, which is a role women in China had to follow. Moreover, marriage is a very important step in women lives. The marriage of a couple in the village where Kingston’s aunt lived was very important because any thing an individual would do would affect the village and create social disorder. Men dominated women physically and mentally. In paragraph eighteen, “they both gav...
the inevitable end to morality in a hard determinist framework. Instead morality, if not wholly, at
The problem of free will and determinism is a mystery about what human beings are able to do. The best way to describe it is to think of the alternatives taken into consideration when someone is deciding what to do, as being parts of various “alternative features” (Van-Inwagen). Robert Kane argues for a new version of libertarianism with an indeterminist element. He believes that deeper freedom is not an illusion. Derk Pereboom takes an agnostic approach about causal determinism and sees himself as a hard incompatibilist. I will argue against Kane and for Pereboom, because I believe that Kane struggles to present an argument that is compatible with the latest scientific views of the world.
In order to go beyond the objects of human reason, Hume proposed that reasoning was based upon cause and effect. Causal relations help us to know things beyond our immediate vicinity. All of our knowledge is based on experience. Therefore, we need experience to come to causal relationships of the world and experience constant conjunction. Hume stated that he “shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition which admits no exception, that the knowledge of this relation is not in any instance, attained by reasonings ‘a priori’, but arises entirely from experience.” (42)
'The choice between them depends not on which one is right, but what we wish to know'
Free will is known to be connected to moral responsibility. Many ancient thinkers tried to encourage society that humans have control over their decisions and the actions that we perform depend on us. It is believed that actions are not pre-determined and aren’t caused by natural determinism (InformationPhilosopher, [no date]). Free will is “The ability or discretion to choose; free choice: chose to remain behind of my own free will” (The Free Dictionary, 2014). This means that people have the complete free choice to do as they please and make decisions. However, having complete free will would imply that people would make random and unpredictable decisions, something that would be very hard to argue. Determinism is “The philosophical doctrine that every state of affairs, including every human event, act, and decision is the inevitable consequence of antecedent states of affairs” (The Free Dictionary, 2014). There are different types of determinism; genetic, environmental, psychic, hard and soft. Genetic determinism looks at how behaviour is determined down to our internal and biological systems. Environmental determinism believes that all behaviours are learned and they can only be determined by the environment. Skinner believed that free will was just an illusion. Psychic determinism looks at how behaviour can be pre-determined by events from early childhood. Hard determinism suggests that social forces outside our control shape everything we do. It was believed that no action can be free if it is determined to occur. Soft determinism is the view that our actio...
B. Unconditional Election God has chosen some for salvation and some to be condemned. Whether or not one is predestinated for salvation can not be affectet by oneself. Its not because of what one has done or not done, there is no reason for the predestination and no possibility to change the own status.
Freedom, or the concept of free will seems to be an elusive theory, yet many of us believe in it implicitly. On the opposite end of the spectrum of philosophical theories regarding freedom is determinism, which poses a direct threat to human free will. If outside forces of which I have no control over influence everything I do throughout my life, I cannot say I am a free agent and the author of my own actions. Since I have neither the power to change the laws of nature, nor to change the past, I am unable to attribute freedom of choice to myself. However, understanding the meaning of free will is necessary in order to decide whether or not it exists (Orloff, 2002).
b. Dreams are freeing as they can present insights and ideas to those who interpret