determinism

Free Will

Imagine if you found yourself in a state of bondage where every action desire and feeling was planned on an inexorable agenda that you could not help but comply with. Although this seems like a dark and fantastical world, if the idea of determinism is fully accepted than it may not be as distant as you might think. The idea of Free Will is one of the most timeless and dubitable philosophical questions and is imposable to disregard. The idea of Free Will has three prevailing schools of thought, consisting of Determinism, (The belief that every action is determined and therefore, not free.), Liberalism (the belief that our actions are not causally determined and therefore, free.)and lastly, Compatibilism (The belief that Determinism is Compatibilism with Free Will.). Each outlook has its points as well as dissentions, but of all the angles, the one I must believe in is Compatibilism and this is why. Although Compatibilism is what I choose to believe, the other arguments are based on principals that cannot be ignored. The first view that I am going to deal with is that of the Determinist, namely the “Hard” one. Determinism is the belief that every action is the result of a previous action, and was therefore determined to occur. If all actions are determined by previous actions than no actions can be made freely. Like the cosmological argument, determinism rests on the logical fact that no uncaused event can occur. What separates a Determinist˜ from a compatibilist is the belief that any action that occurs could not of happened in any other way. If this were the case then it would be theoretically possible to predict the future simply by observing the past and present. Because nobody can successfully and consistently predict the future, some people believe that this is an argument against determinism. The determinist easily dismisses this argument with the response that humans don’t have the power to see let alone interpret the myriad of events that lead to an action. Another common argument is the idea that if you were told what the future had in store for you, you could therefore consciously alter this out come. This argument is smashed with the fact that if you were told the future and you altered it, the future you were told was not the future because what actually occurred was different than what was predicted. Although, the strongest argument...

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...cause you ran out of gas, the reason you ran out of gas is because you were driving your car, the reason that you were driving your car was because you had to drive to work, the reason that you had to go to work was because you needed to feed and shelter yourself. As you can see, even the most mundane task of going to the gas station can be linked back to basic human survival. Now imagine that you are at the gas station and you realize that your oil is very low. As a result you go inside and find two brands of oil, neither of which you have seen before. Both brands cost the same, have the same ingredients, have the same general appearance, (ex. color, shape and texture) and are both equally accessible. Even though it was causally determined that you are in the gas station making this decision, the decision it’s self is under no constraint and can go one way as easily as the other and is there fore a free, as well as causally determined decision.

Even though the writing of this paper was causally constrained and did

not answer a single question, I hope that it helped you as much as it helped my

self get a grasp on the most enduring question of all.

bibliography: sparknotes