Free Will in a Deterministic Universe (Free Essay Sample)

Free will is, was, and always will be in constant debate. Free will over the years has been defined in millions of different ways. A few examples that should be shared but for this essay will not be used as the definition for this essay are “the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe.” or “the ability to freely choose our own actions and determine our own outcomes.” Although these definitions work and bring new debates to the table for this paper we will be looking at Free will as a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. So, knowing this we still have a few terms to go over such as determinism, compatibilism, Libertarian, and Incompatibilism. Starting with Determinism which is the idea that the causal laws of the world in order to challenge the claim that we have free will, everything that happens can be fully explained by the causal history of what happened before. Essentially it is saying there is no free will because everything happens because of an event/events before it. Compatibilism is defined as claim that determinism and moral responsibility are actually compatible. This idea is that you can have no free will and still have moral responsibility which essentially makes the concept of free will and its effects null. Then the opposite of this is the ideas of Next Libertarianism which is Incompatibilism. Those who claim that we have libertarian free will argue that we make free choices when it is possible that we could have done otherwise than what we actually did. This allows for moral responsibility. The question now that many of the terms have been defined is do we have free will assuming that the universe is deterministic. Looking at the idea that we do have free will, the argument is that if we do not have free will there will be no moral responsibility but everyone feels morality so we must have free will. The No side of this argument is that even if we have no moral responsibility do we have to change or can we just shift our view on morality to protection of the public? Then we look at free will from a scientific standpoint with the Yes argument looking at if the world is even deterministic and the no side explaining hard determinism.  

Starting with the argument for Free will through a moral standpoint. This point of view says that there is free will because people have a sense of morality but having no free will disproves moral responsibility. This is the viewpoint of hard incompatibilist Libertarianism argument. This is seen in the book https://books.google.com/bookshl=en&lr=&id=KW3JMsEHE4wC&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=free+will&ots=5QasBNNn-T&sig=TbTFHZt6ctScGN-NTB-uu1YGSRg#v=onepage&q&f=false (Four Views on Free Will) A reliable source because it is from a well-known author one being Derk Pereboom a philosopher from the Netherlands using peer revied resources. It has the small flaw of being from 2007 and using research before that. This is not a large problem because philosophy tends to stay timeless. The hard incompatibilist Libertarianism argument is saying that free will is incompatible with causal determinism, and agents have free will. They therefore deny that causal determinism is true. This argument is fueled off the sense of morality and sense of free will everyone has. They use examples like where someone works and a branching path to argue that there are choices and people have to possibility to reach any end point on the tree unlike no free will arguments where it would be a straight line. While people who believe in Libertarianism also believe in incompatibilism but not all people who believe in incompatibilism believe Libertarianism. This is due to there being the other side of the coin of no free will arguments. We find another weird coincidence with Libertinisms in philosophy and politics. We find that many Libertarians in politics also believe in Libertarianism ideas of free will.  

The last argument argued that moral responsibility and the incompatibility with free will means we have free will because we feel morality. This could be wrong because although at a first glance free will and moral responsibility and having no free will, do not fit together but with a closer inspection they can. This is seen in Frankfurt's objections found in The Frankfurt Cases: The Moral of the Stories found extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/viewer.html?pdfurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.andrewmbailey.com%2Fjmf%2FFrankfurt_Cases_Moral_of_the_Stories.pdf&clen=114477&chunk=true. The Frankfurt objections looks at someone they call Black wants Jones to do a certain action and will go to extremes to get it. He will only go to these extremes when they know that Jones is not going to make the decision he wants. Jones for the time being is oblivious. Now they argue that if Black must force his hand or not Jones still only has one option. This is the argument that there is no free will and only one possible future exists. This then means that Jones if he chooses the correct option without Black, he is morally responsible because he would have done it without Black even being ready to force it, but he still only had that one option. As the source explains “If Frankfurt is correct in suggesting both that Jones is morally responsible for taking the action Black wants him to take and that he is not free to do otherwise; moral responsibility, in general, does not require that an agent have the freedom to do otherwise...” The Frankfurt cases were written by philosopher Harry Frankfort whose work is globally recognized he also works at Princton moving from Yale. His credentials prove that this source is credible. This source is also reliable because it uses a form of basic logic to present a complex idea. This means that anyone can understand it meaning it is not hiding errors with complex talk. The source could have a drawback because it was written in the 60s and new ideas have been introduced. Although philosophy is a timeless subject, therefore this drawback means little to nothing.