Why Do Free Will Exist

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.

It also depends on how we explain free will; free will in this case is how one acts out on their own will. Our genetics can determine how we can act. When our

People who believe that we have no free will, that there is no free actions are known as a hard determinists. In other words, hard determinism is the doctrine that there are no free actions. To them, everything is casually determined and no one acts freely. The hard determinist does not deny that it seems that we have free will. What they deny is that the way things seems is the way they are. Nothing could ever be any other way than the way it is. Choices do not exist, free will does not exist, and randomness does not exist. What happens depends entirely on the previous arrangements of its cause and could not be otherwise.

I want to argue that there is indeed free will. In order to defend the position that free will means that human beings can cause some of what they do on their own; in other words, what they do is not explainable solely by references to factors that have influenced them. My thesis then, is that human beings are able to cause their own actions and they are therefore responsible for what they do. In a basic sense we are all original actors capable of making moves in the world. We are initiators of our own behavior.

Do we really have free will or is it as mythical as are the gods and most just simply don’t know it yet? As I am not a philosopher I do not know for sure, but I would assume that it is a question that has been a plague to their thoughts for a while. There are many ways to talk about this topic though this will only be covering a few aspects. The inspiration for this was a combination of the popular Greek play called Oedipus by Sophocles and a paper written by Mrs. Cysewski containing instructions for a report which her class was going to write. Back to the topic at hand: do we make our own personal decisions or is that just what we think?

It has been debated over centuries whether us humans have control over our destiny, and if we are really able to decide on our own. The controversy between free will and determinism has been argued about for years. If we look into a dictionary, free will is define as the power given to human beings to be able to make free choices that is unconstrained by external circumstances or a force such as fate or divine intervention. Determinism is defined as a philosophical doctrine that every event, act, and decision is the inescapable consequence of antecedents that are independent of the human will. Determinism states that humans have no free will to choose what they wish. Due to this fact, contemporary philosophers cannot agree whether free will does exist, let alone it be a divine influence.

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

Partly due to this being a critical part of everyone’s lives and also partly because determining if there is free will helps to address if a person is responsible for their actions, especially when they go against what is perceived as morally correct by society. The three theories about free will handle this issue in different ways. The first to be addressed will be the determinist. The determinist does not believe that there is free will, due to the belief that every action comes about due to a previous cause and cannot come about for no reason (Rachels 97). This would go against what is known about the world through our understanding of science. Therefore, this theory asserts that since a person cannot control the previous causes that would bring about their current action, there must not be free will. This has led some of its proponents to argue that man is not accountable to his actions, as he cannot control the circumstances that have led to an immoral action. One of these proponents, B.D. Skinner, believed that people’s choices were based on the conditioning they had been subjected to in their lives, and that this conditioning should also be to blame for the actions of people. He proposed that, since the actions had been determined by the conditioning of the person, that free will is not possible and punishment should be based on new conditioning

Before going on, let us be clear about what we mean by the term free will.

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

It demonstrates that actions are by all means determined by their respective causes; events do not happen spontaneously. As such, the argument over free will boils down to whether or not conscious human effort is the the very last link in every chain of event. Richard Chisholm attempts to defend the affirmative position of this debate. He defines causation as either being “transeunt”--in which an event causes another event--or as being “immanent”--in which an agent causes an event. (Chisholm, 421). A man moves a rock with a stick in an example of Aristotle’s that Chisholm provides. While the rock’s movement is directly brought on by the movement of a stick, it is ultimately pushed forward by the man’s conscious decision to move his hand--which happens to hold the stick. I do not argue with this reasoning, as it is further evidence that actions can be predictable and in fact determined by prior ones--the man moved his hand, and due to various intermediaries, the rock must’ve consequently

Determinism is Self-Refuting. If free will is an illusion and everything is predetermined, then the ultimate cause of why a person believes that free will is an illusion and everything is predetermined is that they were predetermined to do so. But it’s hard to see how a belief can be considered “true” or “false” when it is, ultimately, simply a predetermined event. The snow falling outside my window right now is due to the fact that preexisting conditions determined it to be so. But we wouldn’t say that the snowfall is “true” or “false.”

First, I will present the argument in favor of the notion that free will exists. Philosophers such as Harry Frankfurt argue that true free will is the ability to favor a certain will or, in Frankfurt’s words, “The statement that a person enjoys freedom of the will means (also roughly) that he is free to want what he wants

Saying that you have no free will means that there is a pre determined system of fate that is in place. You must ask yourself these questions: Can you change the past? Can you see your predetermined responses before they happen? Are you in charge of the quantum mechanical physics that have shaped the world?

               There are many great philosophical ideas and questions that are known and of course unknown. One of the questions that really enticed my interest was the question of whether or not we have free will. I myself was once a believer of people having free will and doing what I want was my choice and my choice alone. However, after careful consideration and lectures I have been reversed in how I believe in free will. Is there any free will though? Many people would say yes there is and of course there are some who believe that free will is a fallacy and not to be believed. Whether or not there is free will is yet to be determined but what we have to go on