Human Beings as Being Genuinely Free Essay

There is much debate over the issue of whether we have complete freedom of the will or if our will caused by something other than our own choosing. There are three positions adopted by philosophers regarding this dispute: determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism. Determinists believe that freedom of the will does not exist. Since actions are events that have some predetermined cause, no actions can be chosen and thus there is no will to choose. The compatibilist argues that you can have both freedom of the will and determinism. If the causes which led to our actions were different, then we could have acted in another way which is compatible with freedom of the will. Libertarians believe that freedom of the will does exist.

    A main idea in the first chapter is about the history of slavery and freedom in the U.S. Firstly slavery had existed during the American Revolution. Despite the fact that the founding fathers wanted freedom as a right to all men, then African Americans should also rightfully be allowed freedom. Foner quotes Lemuel Haynes, “ If liberty were truly ‘an innate principle” for all mankind’ Haynes wrote, ‘ even an African [had] as equally good a right to his liberty in common with Englishmen.’(Foner 9). Slavery was a problem in the United States history from the beginning.

At the same time, the Libertarians believe that people have “free will”, and there are no such inevitable results of those behaviors that are controlled by “free will”. Libertarianism has different meanings in different academic fields. From the general level, the libertarianism refers to people’s ability to decide whether or not to do something according to their

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.

America is the universal symbol of freedom. But is it really free? Does the history of the United States stay true to the ideas of our forefathers? Or has the definition been altered to fit American policies? Has freedom defined America? Or has America defined freedom? I believe America was at first defined by freedom, then after time, America defined freedom, altering the definition to fit the niche it fits in, but still keeping key components so it still seems to be staying true to the ideas of America’s founding fathers.

“I am self-propelled; fueled from within. I appreciate people’s opinions, but I am not attached to them. I learned a long time ago that if I give them the power to feed me, I also give them the power to starve me.” -Dr. Steve Maraboli. When I read this quote I thought he was describing that no one can hold him back and he is going to be free. My question is what does it mean to be free? Does it mean not caring what others think about you? Or is it being free to accomplish your dreams with no regrets and nothing holding you back? Being free means different things to different people. In the poem “Caged Bird,” by Maya Angelou, she talks about two types of people one being caged and one being free. In his poem “Mother to Son,” Langston Hughes talks about there will bumps in the road of life, but you have to forge your path to be free. In the poem, “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost discusses the two roads a person can take, either you can be free and not care about other's opinions, or you can be trapped by everyone’s thoughts about you. You can be free by not caring about others opinion’s on you, but by making your own path. So will you choose to be free or will you choose to be dragged down by other’s opinions about you?

The American Civil War claimed the lives of over 700,000 people. The war was fought from 1861-1865. The results of the war were described as; a union victory, abolishment of slavery, territorial integrity preserved and the destruction and dissolution of the Confederate States. The twelve years that followed were called the Reconstruction Era, 1865-1877. The purpose of the Reconstruction Era was to restore National Unity, strengthen the government, and guarantee rights to freed slaves. The reality of reconstruction though was; violence (260,000 dead), newly freed slaves suffered the most, and Lincoln's hopes of trust and rededication to peace were lost when he was assassinated on April 15th, 1865. It is these realities of the Reconstruction Era and beyond that this paper will address and how those realities affected the newly freed slaves. Life in post-bellum America for African - Americans was violent and filled with fear because of white supremacy, lynching, and the brutal mutilations of blacks.

The power or right to act, speak or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint. A word created by man to escape the bonds of tyranny to express the idea of what it means to persist one's own ambitions. Freedom. Freedom is not the absence of confinement but the will to achieve freedom when imprisoned. After carefully concluding the reading done over this semester one is able to clearly understand the confinement these early Americans felt and their decision to achieve a form of freedom. Freedom has always existed but it is the history of this nation that will define what actions freedom takes.

The question of our freedom is one that many people take for granted. However, if we consider it more closely it can be questioned. The thesis of determinism is the view that every event or happening has a cause, and that causes guarantee their effects. Therefore given a cause, the event must occur and couldn’t occur in any other way than it did. Whereas, the thesis of freewill is the view that as human beings, regardless of a cause, we could have acted or willed to act differently than we did. Determinism therefore, states that the future is something that is fixed and events can only occur in one way, while freewill leaves the future open. Obviously a huge problem arises between these two theses. They cannot both be true

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country, but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly, it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right but "to bind us in all classes whatsoever" and

The word freedom is often associated with the idea of an unfettered liberty to select from a range of alternatives coupled with a sense that our actions will not affect our natural state.

The problem of freewill concerns whether it is possible to retain agency in a world where events are necessitated. For the sake of clarity, my definition of freewill is “the power of acting or not acting without constraint”. Universal causation or hard determinism (both terms I shall use interchangeably) is the belief that “events in the future are fixed, as a matter of natural law, by the past”. Indeterministic theories such as libertarianism preserve freewill by maintaining that not all events are determined by preceding causes. Both indeterminism and determinism are incompatibilist theories as they imply that universal causation erodes the prospect of freewill. Compatibilist theories, like agent-causalism assert that causation doesn’t necessarily mean we do not have free will.

Many ideas are important within the American culture, but to the American sense of patriotism, freedom is most fundamental. The idea of freedom is central to the American politics – which is at times referred to as liberty. Since the birth of the nation, freedom has been the vocabulary of the American language and its importance cannot be underestimated. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, ranks liberty as an inalienable right. On the other hand, the Constitution reckons that it purposes to protect civilians’ liberty. The importance of freedom has even stretched further than the political arena and has prompted the birth of civil rights movements and other activist protests. The Cold War and the Civil War were all for the cause of freedom. The importance that Americans attach to freedom can also be demonstrated from the erection of statues, banishment of slavery, use of liberty poles and a right to vote for adults. For many years, women and the African Americans have for a long time fought against denial and infringement of their freedom . However, given the importance that Americans affiliate to freedom in the conceptualization of their country, it has been the subject of modifications over the course of years especially before the Revolutionary War.

In the paper, “Human Freedom and the Self” Roderick M. Chisholm offers his theory of human freedom and defends it against a couple objections. One of the objections we will talk about which is the second objection is connected to the concept of immanent causation, where causation is by an agent, he argues how the statement “the prime mover unmoved” (page 391) has been subject to difficulty. Chisholm explains immanent causation as being an agent causing the event A to happen, but although the agent is causing A to happen the agent is not moved by anything. The argument to this objection is that “there must be some event A, which is caused not by any other event but by the agent” (page 391). Well since A was not cause by another event then the agent couldn’t have produced anything either to bring A about, so “what did the agent’s causation consist of” (page 391). Also another point that was made in the objection was the question “what is the difference between A’s just happening and the agents causing A to happen” (page 391). Chisholm responds by saying that there is a difference between man causing A and an event causing A. The two are not the same because transeunt causation is connected to determinism, which makes the train of events, happen and immanent causation as he explains it is when the agent causes the event. He then sums up his answer by saying the reason “lies in the fact that, in the first case but not the second, the event was caused by the man” (pg. 391) He

Encarta Dictionary says that Humanism is a system of thought that centers on human beings and their values, capacities and worth. Encarta also goes on the say that, in philosophy, humanism is an attitude that emphasizes the dignity and worth of an individual. A basic premise of humanism is that people are rational beings who possess within themselves the capacity for truth and goodness. I see myself as a being a humanist through everyday life. I always try to see the good in a person when he/she makes me angry or sad, and say I to myself that maybe that person has had a bad day and living life is difficult at the moment. Socrates was even an early humanist of sorts. He can be quoted as saying, "to know the good is to do the