Determinism
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Free Will
James Anderson
Imagine if you found yourself in a state of bondage where every action desire and feeling was planned on an inexorable agenda that you could not help but comply with. Although this seems like a dark and fantastical world, if the idea of determinism is fully accepted than it may not be as distant as you might think. The idea of Free Will is one of the most timeless and dubitable philosophical questions and is imposable to disregard. The idea of Free Will has three prevailing schools of thought, consisting of Determinism, (The belief that every action is determined and therefore, not free.), Liberalism (the belief that our actions are not causally determined and therefore, free.)and lastly, Compatibilism (The belief that Determinism is Compatibilism with Free Will.). Each outlook has its points as well as dissentions, but of all the angles, the one I must believe in is Compatibilism and this is why. Although Compatibilism is what I choose to believe, the other arguments are based on principals that cannot be ignored. The first view that I am going to deal with is that of the Determinist, namely the “Hard” one. Determinism is the belief that every action is the result of a previous action, and was therefore determined to occur. If all actions are determined by previous actions than no actions can be made freely. Like the cosmological argument, determinism rests on the logical fact that no uncaused event can occur. What separates a DeterministÐ? from a compatibilist is the belief that any action that occurs could not of happened in any other way. If this were the case then it would be theoretically possible to predict the future simply by observing the past and present. Because nobody can successfully and consistently predict the future, some people believe that this is an argument against determinism. The determinist easily dismisses this argument with the response that humans dont have the power to see let alone interpret the myriad of events that lead to an action. Another common argument is the idea that if you were told what the future had in store for you, you could therefore consciously alter this out come. This argument is smashed with the fact that if you were told the future and you altered it, the future you were told was not the future because what actually occurred was different than what was predicted. Although, the strongest argument against determinism is the inherent moral dilemma. If every action was already predetermined and there was no way of going around it, than how can we hold people responsible for committing crimes, or give praise for noble deeds, if the person had no choice but to do as they did, how could they be held morally responsible for their actions, it would be like punishing your dog for eating. Could you imagine a world with no moral responsibility, albeit the world would be a much more accepting place, the
price would be indifference and there would be nothing left to strive for, or to restrain you from treachery. It would be like sitting contently as a passive train pasengar, just waiting to see where the trains terminal track takes him. The deterministic argument that every action is the result of a prior action is imposable to dismiss, but whether or not you have a choice in what action you make is still up for grabs.
Although it is very difficult to indisputably prove the case for Determinism, it is equally testing to argue free will. As I mentioned before, free will relies highly on the idea of responsibility. In order to deny free will, you must also deny responsibility, which is a very difficult thing for anyone to do. If we are truly ruled by causal law, than how could any event of occurred other wise, so in order to save moral responsibility, we must either disprove or reinterpret these causal laws. Most people consider free will as being able to make choices and find alternatives that have not already been determined. The Incompatibilist or liberalist believes that in order to make these choices freely, Determinism must be false. Although it is a hard battle to fight for the liberalist, seeing that the argument for determinism is fairly air tight, they still make some reputable arguments. The Incompatibilists case for free will is generally broken down into three groups; non-causal accounts, event-causal accounts and agent-causal accounts. Non-causal accounts are actions that have no internal or external causal
factors and are therefore free actions. Some Incompatibilists believe that
this is the only free action while others believe that a free action may be caused as long as it is not determined. It seems to me that in order for an event to be uncaused it would have to be a random event, because it could have no thought, purpose, or any type of grounds to it. Even though true random events occur on a metaphysical level, there is no proof that they can occur on the behavioral level and even if they could would you really consider a random action a free action. Event Causal accounts are actions that are caused by previous events, but unlike the Compatibilists view, they are Non-Deterministically caused. This conviction
entails that the Agent has a control over their actions and even though the agent may have chosen to act as he did for the reasons that he did there was still a chance (if physically permitting) that the agent could have acted otherwise. One common argument against this case is that it is excessive and does not give any greater power or weight to the agents actions than the compatibilists