Free Will

Free Will

1. Free Will

   • Have to have to have free will to have moral resonsilbility
   • Computers and non-humans can never have independent moral thought
   • Hard to determine how much someone is free
   • To be a free human agent you need consciousness
   • Finding degree of moral responsibility can often be hard
   • Need to have ability to tell right from wrong, therefore, some people who have learning difficulties and children cannot be accountable for their actions
   • Some argue that we have an innate sense of right and wrong

2. Determinism

   • All events and states of affairs including all human decisions and actions are the necessary consequence of previous states of affairs
     • Based on universal causation, everything is a chain of causes and effects, sufficient to determine everything
   • Reductionism
     • Understand that everything reduces down
       • biology to chemistry to physics
         • We are therefore, determined by science
     • Possibility our feelings of freedom is simply ignorance fo the causes-Spinoza
   • Ethical choices do not exits
   • Scientific Determinism
     • All events, including human actions and choices are determined by pervious events and states of affairs
       • Equations in physics are deterministic
         • Everything appears to be dependant, no gap where metal input could have been interred
   • Psychological determinism
     • Skinner, all behaviour is a result of genetic and environmental conditions
       • Conditioned by good and bad and the consequences of previous decisions-no free will
   • Theoloigcal Determinism
     • Doctrine of predestination
       • God's omniscience, some eternally ordained to the glory some are ordained to the eternal torment
         • All determined by God

3. Libertinism

   • All forms of determinism are false
     • Free moral agents
   • Modern libertarian
     • Does not deny that the external world is deterministic
       • Accepts that personality is externally governed by heredity
         • Insists that all human behaviour us not determined by external causes
         • We have physical, psychological and social limitations
     • We have a sense of guilt, that we must take moral responsibility
   • We experience ourselves are free

4. Compatibilism

   • Human freedom and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism
   • Hume
     • Liberty of Spontaneity
       • Ability to do what you desire, kind of necessity required by causal determinisms not logical necessity
       • Cannot talk of necessary laws of cause and effect
         • Always a chance something might not happen
       • Human actions stem from the Hyman choices require fee will
         • Freedom requires determinism
       • I our wishes and desires were simply random, the oder of human life, by which we make sense of the world and ourselves, would be lost
         • We shared by physical and other laws but have the ability to make free choices