Causality Vs Free Will Essay

Or is each action pre-determined? These are interesting concepts that will bring us to the issues that will be discussed throughout this paper. Do we truly have free will on our actions or are they previously determined for us? Free will and Determinism offer us different views on how we can perceive the ultimate course of our actions and life.

Determinism is a doctrine suggesting that for every event there exist conditions that could cause no alternative event. Free will is a philosophical term describing a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Understandably, the dichotomy between these two concepts is a topic philosophers have debated over for many years. As a result of these debates, a number of alternative philosophical perspectives arguing for the existence of free will, namely libertarianism and compatibilism, have emerged, existing in stark contrast to determinism. In order to ascertain the extent to which free will is compatible with determinism, one must first consider these different approaches to

Your geography and you beliefs determined greatly who you are as a person but no one had a choice on that during their formative years. So there are so many factors and causes that affect freewill that’s not under the individual’s control. Let’s acknowledge that. In the context of life being a canvas you can visualize your life as a specific and unique individual pathway on the canvas of life with with different choices(options) available as one moves through time. At each moment in time, different choices are available to you within said predetermined path. The pathway is already predetermined because all time exist at all time all the time, but within each moment you’re are presented with certain set of choices (different set of choices are available at different point in time). These choices range from good to evil as far as their impacts are concerned. So this is why it makes sense to say true freewill doesn’t exist but we can make choices within the predetermined path we find ourselves in. If you think about it from a believer point of view, it’s basically God created everyone differently (predetermined path), with different gifts (drives) manifested through choices available to us at each moment in time. Evil and good are natural forces in this world which

People believe that genuine freedom of choice is not always possible because our decisions and actions are determined by factors beyond our control. This view is known as Determinism. There is also an extreme form of determinism known as ‘hard determinism,’ in which they believe that every demeanor can be traced to a cause, although they may disagree about what those causes are. The idea of determinism poses a difficult issue to the concept of ‘free will’. Are we able to make free choices if all our thoughts and actions are predetermined by our own past and the physical laws of nature? Majority of us would like to believe that we have the freedom of will and are able to make decisions based on our own discretion but, I personally believe that the deterministic view holds true to a certain extent and that most of our actions are a result of a force that is beyond our comprehension. My purpose in this essay is to explain and critically analyze Baron d’Holbach’s view on determinism.

1: Determinism makes it impossible for us to “cause and control our actions in the right kind of way.”(3)

The first matter to be noted is that this view is in no way in contradiction to science. Free will is a natural phenomenon, something that emerged in nature with the emergence of human beings, with their

To establish determinism, we can admit by denoting that some events in our lives happen because of prior reasons without yet losing our sense of freedom. It is actually evident that the events and actions that an individual undertakes action have different effects upon him even though they may be past or present events. Though we might not be sure whether our past event result to our present status in life, it is pertinent to note that freedom in decision making is an open forum for each individual and impacts on later activities. We can admit that some events, for example, a next domino fall, are bound to happen because of a prior event. It is possible that if we have no power to act other than us, in fact, to act, then we have no free will. This argument for hard determinism is persuasive. It is certainly valid, and none of the premises appears to be clearly false. Although we have discovered a plausible argument in defense of hard determinism, most people find this argument to be impossible to accept. In our lives, we hold each other in account of our deeds that we had made wrong choices.

As humans, free will is something we commonly assume we have. When evaluating what free will is, we become less certain. David Hume calls it “the most contentious question of metaphysics.” In simplistic terms, free will is having the ability to determine your own plan of action. There is a relationship between free will and freedom of action and causal determinism that must be evaluated to have a complete understanding of free will. There are compatibilist views that believe in free will and incompatibilist views that imply there is no free will. Free will is also related to both theological determinism and logical determinism.

Determinism, libertarianism and compatibilism are three significantly different views on where unaccountability might stop and where free will and moral responsibility begin. Determinism is the strict opinion that every action and decision is the cause of an event, genetics or the environment prior to that action. Quite the opposite is libertarianism, which happens to be the genuine belief in free will as well as the denial of universal causation. Finally, deep self-compatibilism meshes both of these stand points together and introduces the idea that one’s action can be free if it stems purely out of personal, authentic desire. Since all three judgments have a backbone of convincing

Whether we have free will is widely controversial. The absence of a universal definition poses a primary problem to this question. In this essay, I shall base my argument on a set of three conditions for free will: 1) that the actor is unconstraint in his action, 2) the actor could have acted otherwise and 3) the actor must be ‘ultimately responsible’ (Kane, 2005: 121) for his action. After I have explained them, I shall apply these conditions to three scenarios that cover most, if not any, circumstances that occur when taking choices. The purpose of this essay is to show that if my conditions are true, none of the scenarios is based on free will and thus we do not have free will.

However, there are two possible drawbacks to the argument of the compatibilists. The first challenge comes from the determinist’s argument that causation does not leave room for free will. The objection that Ayer presents is why should we think the causation is constrained? We should think of freedom as a constraint, rather than causation because we must be free sometimes. In response to the objection by determinists is the concept of freedom being constrained is a failure to face reality.

The issue of free will has been a subject of much debate for centuries among philosophers, thinkers, and even mystics. The reason why discussing if free will exists or not is so important is because if its existence is disproven, it would have several implications in many fields of the human life and even on the purpose and meaning, or lack of thereof, of human life itself. The non-existence of free will also have an effect on how we perceive, and probably act, in regards to the accountability of a person’s actions, impulses, and motives along with how the judicial system is structured given the change in status quo of the way we think about the intricate mechanism of how we operate as human beings and as a society in general. If we do not have free will, then questions that are societally-related such as “are we accountable for our actions?” and religiously-related such as “is salvation and heaven and hell predetermined for every person? And if that is so, how is it that such an unfairness would come about from a perfect God?” can greatly impact our own humanity, core values, and religious

For centuries, philosophers and scientists alike have debated the nature of consciousness, human freedom, and moral responsibility. Quantum Mechanics (QM) would indicate that on the smallest, most fundamental scale of the universe, indeterminism is logically true, and provides room for free will theory in our universe. Alternatively, adequate determinism proposes that macroscopic events can be statistically predicted with impressive precision, but that the unpredictability of microscopic events has no noticeable effect on the macroscopic world. There are other subcategories of determinism and indeterminism, all of which bring interesting perspectives on the nature of the reality, and all of which have a large impact on moral responsibility.

“According to Stanford Encyclopedia free will is seen as a philosophical concept, which consists of rational agents to choose appropriate actions from various alternatives. Philosophers have discussed this question for over two centuries, and yet there is no clear agreement about free will definition. Philosophers agree that the concept of free will is inter-correlated with the concept of moral responsibility. According to that statement, to act with free means –to be responsible for one’s actions. Free will is not only the responsibility, it is also a required background for accomplishments, for the autonomy and individual dignity (O'Connor,

The problem with free will lies in such sentiment, reflecting the determinism thesis. It would be irrational to jump to the conclusion that we are independent of the causal laws that govern the rest of the universe. Determinism is the view that all events are inevitable and that our actions and behaviors is a part of a larger causal chain. In considering scientific observation of the laws of nature, the determinism thesis sounds just as plausible as the free will thesis -but how can we both have a