Free will and Determinism

Question	Answer
CLARENCE DARROW	Lawyer of the Leopold and Loeb case. Believed that actions were determined by their upbringing, environment and ancestry.
JOHN HOSPERS	Everything that we do is caused by an external or internal force which makes us think that what we are doing is a product of free will.
JOHN LOCKE	Analogy: a man is sleeping in a locked room, when he wakes up he decides to stay in bed but doesn't realise that in reality he cannot move out of the room anyway.
DAWKINS	All of our feelings are down to our biology and moral responsibility is down to natural selection.
TED HONDERICH	Everything is physically determined; there are no choices. The mind is a product of our brain activity and our actions are caused by psycho-neural events in the brain.
PETER VAN INWAGEN	Libertarianism allows you to choose which branch you want to go down.
WENER HEISENBERG	Better to refer to statistical probabilities than to general laws that we assume will be constant. Some events are uncaused e.g. human decisions.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE	Freedom is our goal! Without freedom of choice, there is no meaning to life.
JOHN CALVIN	God has already chosen who he's going to save and who he's going to damn. 'You are going to do something before you have even thought of it. Everything you do is planned'
AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO	God chooses who he's going to give his grace to - this assures salvation for that person.
VOLTAIRE	Pear trees cannot bear bananas - everything is planned.

Resource summary

	Created by Laura Radford about 9 years ago