Free Will : Moral Responsibility

The argument against free will states that; what you do is always determined by what you have the strongest desire to do, but you have no control over what you desire. If what you do is always determined by something that you have no control over then you can never actually act freely. It follows from what has been said that one does not 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.

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.

Human factors are involved wildly in human behaviors and various social systems, including social laws and religion doctrines. Just like what I mentioned previously, scientists believe that the human life is pre-determined and human’s behavior is inevitable. They consider that if someone has all the information of one person, he or she may get to know how he or she is going to change in advance. But from the point of view throughout the history of human society people often turn to emphasize personal responsibility. Law and legal penalties for criminals act based entirely on the idea of individual “free will”. Most Jewish and Christian also believed that individuals should be responsible for the crime and suspects should be punished. We can imagine a psychology professor who believes determinism would say to a student: "You have to concentrate to your study, otherwise you will get nothing!" You can see the contradiction of human behaviors from this typical and ironic statement above, and notice that there exists a deviation between theoretical knowledge and actual human behaviors.

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

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

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 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

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

This paper contends that Sider is wrong. With a revised interpretation of free will and internalization of weight bestowal, indeterminacy might open the door for free action. We will discuss what this paper means by free action and indeterminacy, explore why Sider thinks indeterminacy is incompatible with free action, object Sider’s arguments using Nozick’s proposal of self-subsuming weight bestowal, and investigate possible counter arguments to Nozick’s proposition.

Free will is “the ability to act without being determined by anteceding factors (Strawson 584).” The idea that we are not fully in control of what we are doing and what is going on around us intimidates many people because

We are raised to believe that we are the makers of our own destiny. Every decision we make is our own, and we are free citizens in every sense of the word.

Freedom is a very powerful word and it can mean so many different things for different people. Some people would say that free will is the most important thing we have, but what does free will really mean and how do we know that we are doing something because of our free will? “Freedom lies in expressing your own determinism, not somebody else´s. It is not the determinism that makes a difference, but instead the ownership. If freedom is what we prefer, it is preferable to be determined by forces that originate in ourselves and not in others.” This is a passage from Free Will written by Matt Ridley. According to this passage, determinism has a big impact on how our free will works. We cannot control our determinism since that is something nature

In this essay I will explain why I think the strongest position of the free will debate is that of the hard determinists and clarify the objection that moral responsibility goes out the door if we don’t have free will by addressing the two big misconceptions that are associated with determinists: first that determinism is an ethical system, and secondly that contrary to common belief determinists do believe in the concept of cause and effect. I will also begin by explaining my position and why I believe that the position of the indeterminist does not hold water as an argument and the third

Greetings my dear friend. I wish to present my theory, Kembleenian Determinism, to you; for I believe it has withstood its confutations, and ineluctably gives rise to the notion that our actions and fates are as determined as the stars above. All that we do is not within our purview, but rather only within our view. We thus have no control over our own actions, leading me to the conclusion that the existence of free will is untenable and must be admonished.