Argumentative Essay On Free Will

While it may just seem like semantics, free will and freedom differ. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines free will as a “voluntary choice or decision” or “freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention” (Free 1). Free will includes the ability to make simple, everyday choices. The definition of freedom differs from that of free will: “liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another” and “the absence of necessity, coercion or constraint in a choice or action” (Freedom 1). Someone with freedom can say, do, act, and feel however he wishes without the threat of outside forces.

Free will is the philosophical idea that we have the power to think, choose and act voluntary without any external factors. To believe in free will one believes that we are agents who are capable of making decisions that can alter our course of action regardless of external factors and antecedent conditions. Do not confuse free will with political freedom, which is called liberty. In 1924, two Chicago teenagers, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold kidnapped and murdered a boy named Bobby Franks. Loeb and Leopold were two bright college graduates with what looked like very promising futures.

There are those who think that our behavior is a result of free choice, but there are also others who believe we are servants of cosmic destiny, and that behavior is nothing but a reflex of heredity and environment. The position of determinism is that every event is the necessary outcome of a cause or set of causes, and everything is a consequence of external forces, and such forces produce all that happens. Therefore, according to this statement, man is not free.

What is freedom? Firstly freedom can be said to be our ability to act our will without opposition. Secondly freedom can be said to be the ability to have will in the first place. From the first we can see that ability being oppressed when either other's wills and abilities are more powerful than ours thus stopping our will or when external factors such as say the natural order, or the natural world in exp. If I want to get somewhere and there's a mountain in the way I can't make that happen in the original plan . From the second, one have to argue what is free will really? How "Free" is it? Is it only derived from the first when we are able to remove external forces? No longer do we have kings and queens telling us what to

Free Will is the capacity of acting without the pressures of fate and the ability to act because of one’s discretion. It is an idea that most believe in, because it means that you are in control

Although free will has been defined in multiple, conflicting ways, the present approach analyzes it as a psychological capacity including self-control, choices, planning, and the ability to assess and initiate things independently. These capabilities are useful for making human social life and culture possible, but they depend on a limited resource and therefore often fall short of optimal levels. Religion may be helpful to individuals and society in part because it supports both the exercise of free will and the belief in it.

Free Will: “For the most part, what philosophers working on this issue have been hunting for is a feature of agency that is necessary for persons to be morally responsible for their conduct.” (2)

I want to argue that there is indeed free will. In order to defend the position that free will means that human beings can cause some of what they do on their own; in other words, what they do is not explainable solely by references to factors that have influenced them. My thesis then, is that human beings are able to cause their own actions and they are therefore responsible for what they do. In a basic sense we are all original actors capable of making moves in the world. We are initiators of our own behavior.

Some proponents of free will argue that by choosing to do something, one causes oneself to act. One could have caused oneself to act in another manner, and therefore the act, although caused by that person, is still a free choice. However, that notion is held under scrutiny because a person who acts freely has no evidence that they have acted of his or her own accord. For all one knows, one’s actions and choices could have been causally determined, and although one thought one was acting out of free will, one is not. There is no definite proof to show that one’s choices are made freely. As A.J. Ayer stated in his essay, Freedom and Necessity, “…but from the fact that a man is unaware of the causes of his action, it does not follow that no such causes exist” (Ayer 272). Since there is no way of knowing if one exercises free will, determinism poses a serious threat to the concept of free thinking and free acting human beings.

Free will is using individuality to speak your mind and do what you want on your terms. This directly connects to The Constitution which states that we the people have the freedom to speak what you want and be free to believe what you want to believe. Amendment nine states that everyone will have individual freedom. The founders of America

Do we really have free will or is it as mythical as are the gods and most just simply don’t know it yet? As I am not a philosopher I do not know for sure, but I would assume that it is a question that has been a plague to their thoughts for a while. There are many ways to talk about this topic though this will only be covering a few aspects. The inspiration for this was a combination of the popular Greek play called Oedipus by Sophocles and a paper written by Mrs. Cysewski containing instructions for a report which her class was going to write. Back to the topic at hand: do we make our own personal decisions or is that just what we think?

There are three major arguments in the thought of free and they are libertarianism, compatibilism, and fatalism. There are both a religious and secular position for this argument. The religious aspect of free will is that it is an objective by God, while the secular position is subjective to causal determinism and the effect of the physical and concrete things on the process of decision-making.

In this book, Sam Harris believed that the reality about human mind does not diminish morality and the significance of social and political freedom, however it can and should modify the way individuals believe about some of the most essential questions in life. The idea of free will affects almost everything that us, human beings, give importance to. It is hard to comprehend about morality, as well as the sentiment of guilt or even personal accomplishments without first thinking that every human being is the true foundation of his or her thoughts and actions. Thus far, the facts tell us that free will is just a mere

Free will represents an impact between two opposite perspectives. From a metaphysics perspective we wonder If we don't have free will then why are we here? What is the point of life if we cannot choose our course of actions. But from a scientific perspective we have questions like is it possible that anything can happen without having it be caused by something else? Some things really can't be described within the science that we all rely on. It makes people have free choices that forms who they are, and are responsible for their consequences. "Majority of philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very closely connected to the concept of moral responsibility"(Connor 2002). I believe that free will is similar to moral responsibility

The question of what does it mean to be free has always hard to answer because is freedom of speech free or is it freedom of religion these are the questions we have to ask.and how do we know if are free or just brainwashed to think we are. But personally I think that freedom is just a mindset especially in America but in other places in the world it is more of freedom of religion.