Determinism: Does A Dog Have 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.

Getting control of your dog is not hard to do nowadays with all the books, articles, documentaries, interviews, and television shows like the Dog Whisperer and Parolees and Pit Bulls, there is always room to learn something new in dog psychology.

Determinism is the idea that everything we do as humans is determined by events prior to us being born and events that have happened in the past. Decisions that you may think are based on your desires, are actually based of things beyond your control. But the big question is, if determinism is

The debate between free will and determinism is something that will always be relevant, for people will never fully admit that we have no free will. But, while we may feel that we control what we do in life, we simply do not. The argument for free will is that individuals have full control and responsibility over their actions, and what they become in life as a whole (The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility by Galen Strawson, page 16). Determinism, on the other hand, is saying that we have no control over our actions and that everything we do in life is determined by things beyond our control (Strawson, page 7). After analysis of The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility by Galen Strawson and Freedom and Necessity by A. J. Ayer,

It all depends on people’s choices and the fact that they have free will to choose what to do with their life. In the novel, there is a word, Zah-mah-ki-bo, which means fate or inevitable destiny. This word exclaims that no matter what somebody does, it is always destiny controlling their actions, and not actually them doing it. This word is almost exactly what determinism means. People can’t help their actions because their whole life is already planned out by some supernatural

Many times I find myself sitting and wondering whether I am fully free or not. I wake up every single morning and do the same routine, which is eat breakfast, go to class or work, do homework, go to the gym, shower, and then go to bed. Does this truly mean I am free? There are a lot of questions that you can ask yourself while following a routine. Is this really the path I should have taken? Were my choices determined by external factors? Determinism is the thesis that an any instant there is only one physically possible future. Robert Blatchford and Walter Terence Stace, two philosophers, both agree that determinism is true, although they have two different views on whether this means that people are free or not. Blatchford believes that everything is predestined. Stace on the other hand, believes that a person chooses what they do because of free will. In this essay I am going to discuss both of the philosophers’ views more in depth and why I favor Stace’s view over Blatchford’s.

Losing self-control and becoming aggressive is an example that Pink provided. This because your actions are determined by your anger, not your own choices. An example that limits the possibility of free will, would be in the food industry and choosing what food to consume. Most murderers reason for killing can be traced back to events that happened in the past, usually their childhood. The choices then influenced how they behaved in the future and does not completely defend their actions. The documentary, Fed Up, also shows that our preferences are not actually our own. The food industry pays large sums of money in advertisements and other forms of media to convince consumers what to purchase. Most people would not even consider this to be a restriction of their free will, but yet they are not choosing what their eating. Children are being fed fast food from the school’s cafeteria because big chains like McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and other fattening companies pay their way in. They use flashy commercials and slogans that rope children and their parents into obtaining their products. These corporations have even forced their way into the government, putting pressure on Michelle Obama’s campaign to end childhood obesity. Where is the free will in this? Does anyone really decide

Many believe that the world is largely determined but we can still act freely as our behaviour is not predictable. Thomas Aquinas disagreed with hard determinism as he believed that ‘man chooses freely, not out of necessity’. Although Aquinas and others that criticise hard determinism and disagree with the hard determinist views, would still agree with hard determinists in that free will and determinism are incompatible, but would argue that we have free will but our lives are not determined. This view that free will and determinism are incompatible but it is free will that exists, not determinism, is also supported by libertarians.

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

Free will is the ability to do or make your own choice/decision doing it at your own risk. And also free will is when you do what you want doing what you feel

Now, the argument for freewill states that nothing is determined and everything happens based off our own random actions and nothing is linked. Determinism takes a different route and believes every action is pre-determined and nothing is random because it has already been put in place to happen.

My second notion of free will requires that an actor is able to decide between different possibilities of actions that lead towards different futures. Robert Kane calls this concept ‘a garden of forking paths’; every action leads to other actions that again allow for alternatives of action (Kane, 2005: 7). If an actor could not have done otherwise, he would not have had free choice. Even if he did not choose to do otherwise, he could not have done so. Free will seems to require the power to do otherwise, or our actions would

     Free will is one of the features that separates us as humans from animals and allows us to attain intelligent thought and reasoning. Of course, all of the features mentioned are unique to humans; the ability to exercise free will enables us to engage in all

Casual determinism put simply, is the theory that all things happen for a particular reason and everything is predetermined. It is the idea all the events in one’s life can be explained, and each event has a particular reason for being. If everything is predetermined, then this therefore suggests that the future is fixed which further suggests that we can possibly predict the behavior of things. The theory of determinism ultimately suggests that we don’t the capacity to have free will because all future events are destined to occur, and furthermore we do not posses the knowledge to figure out whether it can be proved true or false (Hoefer). There has been three positions that have developed concerning the theory of causal determinism: hard determinist, compatibilist or soft determinist, and compatibilist.