Freedom Versus Determinism

Freedom versus Determinism

The theory of free will expresses our everyday experience of feeling free. Those who argue for free will maintain that we have the capacity to size up a situation, think about our options, and choose how we will act. What we do then is the result of our own, deliberate free choice. Determinism maintains exactly the opposite and claims that everything in nature happens as a result of a cause and effect including human behavior. An ongoing debate over free will and determinism is the question over responsibility. If behavior is determined, what grounds do we have for holding people morally responsible?

In the case for freedom we challenge determinism and the grounds that an action is pre-determined. William James explains this in "The Dilemma of Determinism," when we make theories about the world and discuss them with one another, we do so in order to attain a conception of things which shall give us subjective satisfaction; and if there be two conceptions, and the one seems to us, on the whole, more rational than the other, we are entitled to suppose that the more rational one is truer. To argue our actions are not determined William James refers that in any circumstance we genuinely have more than one option from which to choose. Determinism professes that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. Although he doesn't think that anyone can ultimately prove the issue one way or the other, he thinks that free will, which he calls indeterminism, explains human behavior better. To better position this argument if one was determined to murder would a punishment for these actions be deemed rational? It is difficult to think that there wouldn't be an alternative choice in the matter.

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Immanuel Kant explains determinism to be a kind of fact, and indeterminism to be another. The concept of causality as natural necessity, as distinguished from the concept of causality as freedom, concerns only the existence of things in so far as it is determinable in time and hence as appearances, as opposed to their causality as things in themselves. Now, if one takes the determinations of the existence of things in time for determinations of things-in-themselves (which is the most usual way of representing them), then the necessity in the causal relation can in no way be united with freedom; instead they are opposed to each other as contradictory. For, from the first it follows that every event, and consequently every action that takes place at a point of time, is necessary under the condition of what was in the preceding time. Now, since time past is no longer within my control, every action that I perform must be necessary by determining grounds that are not within my control, that is, I am never free at the point of time in which I act.

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