Free_Will_and_Determinism

It has been a long historical debate of whether determinism is compatible with free will or not. If not, there would be no free will. Thus no one is morally responsible for anything. I will argue in this essay for the incompatibilist argument. If determinism is true and incompatible with free will, then the existence of free will would be ruled out, so is moral responsibility. However, the opposite view, compatibilism, is underlying. It offers a solution for the incompatibility between determinism and free will, because it claims that free will is the necessary condition of moral responsibility. The compatibilist also denies that determinism has the consequences incompatibilist thinks it has. Overall, I think determinism is incompatible with holding people responsible for their actions, and will attempt to demonstrate the argument for incompatibilism. There are various accounts of free will. Thomas Hobbes thought that “a free agent is he that can do as he will, and forbear as he will, and that liberty is the absence of external impediments”. Accordingly, freedom means that one can do what he wants to do without being restricted by externalities (Hobbes, 1997). However, this is equally true of a mechanical robot and no source of someone’s internal motivation is involved. David Hume on another hand suggested that free will is the “power of acting power of acting or of not acting, according to the determination of the will: that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may.… This hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains.” He argued one’s psychological state actually plays a great role on determining his will (Hume, 1978). Nonetheless, if free will is, according to Hobbes and Hume, to say that an agent can choose his course of action and not being restricted by external obstacles, then animals would also have this kind of free will. Moral responsibility is a concept associates with free will. If a person is morally responsible for himself, then he would be accountable for his actions (Hume, 1978). In other words, he is prepared to receive awards or blames for his moral or immoral conducts. However, moral responsibility would only exist if free will exists. Determinism is the most important notion in the argument that I am going to present. It generally means that human action is caused entirely by preceding events, but not the exercise of the will. Firstly, Leibniz summarized determinism as “Principle of Sufficient Reason”. He indicated that everything can be explained in principle, and has a sufficient reason for being and being as it is, and not otherwise (Pruss, 2006). For example, I want to eat is not simply because I want to eat, but because I physically feel hungry. So “feeling hungry” would be the sufficient cause that makes me wants to eat. Likewise, my will of “wanting to eat” is the sufficient cause for me to cook. If I do not want eat, then I will not cook. This is to say that our will, action and effort made are all parts of the causal process. Moreover, we as humans have neither the power to change the causal process, nor to change the past (Pruss, 2006). So the world is actually deterministic. The reason why we are not sure about it is only because of our ignorance. It is possible that scientific investigation will give us insights into this matter in the future. To go back on the question, the statement made sounds like an argument for incompatibilism to me. It basically claims that people cannot have free will if determinism is true, so determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility. To expand on the argument, there are at least two kinds of incompatibilists, hard incompatibilist and libertarian. Hard incompatibilists argues that it is the sufficient causes which make us think, choose and act, not our will. We are only responsible for our actions in a sense which a chess-playing computer is responsible for its moves. Because to be morally responsible for something requires our actions are caused and controlled by, and only by, ourselves, in other words, we have to be the “ultimate source of our actions” (Fischer, 1983). If we are not, then we cannot be morally responsible for our actions and receive any praises or blames (Kane, 1989). However, libertarians claim that determinism is false and people do have free will to a certain extent. A free action can be caused by a self-determining agent, and this is incompatible with deterministic event-causation (Kane, 1989). For example, when we are facing choices, we always choose the “right kind of way”. This is because we also have the power to choose the “wrong kind of way”. If we have the power to choose, then the same power which we excise to choose can too cause our actions in the self-determining way. And if there is only one power, then either determinism entails that we lack this power or it does not (Kane, 1989). Moreover, Donald Davidson suggested in his theory anomalous monism that, although there are deterministic laws in the physical world, but there are no such laws in the mental description, so people can still determine their actions freely (Finch, 1998). To conclude, all incompatibilists, whatever which categories they fall to, agree that the falsity of determinism is a necessary condition for free will. People who argue against incompatibilism are called compatibilists. They believe that free will can exist even if determinism is true, because if there is no free will, people cannot be responsible for their actions (Frankfurt, 1971). To begin with, compatibilists reject that free will requires a person being the “ultimate source” of his actions. Harry Frankfurt argued that there is no bare preference in our will; we may have preferences about our ordinary preferences, that is, second order preferences. If one’s second order preference conflicts with his ordinary preferences, then it is unnecessary that the person is the “ultimate source” of his preferences (Frankfurt, 1971). For example, my ordinary preference is to eat because I am hungry, but my secondary preference is not to eat too much because I do not want to be fat. Accordingly, my secondary preference is from my will not deterministic. Moreover, if one can have a secondary preference which comes from his will while his ordinary preference is influenced by the “sufficient reason”, then it is to say that free will is compatible with the truth of determinism (Frankfurt, 1971). Therefore, I can be responsible for whatever action that is caused by my free will. In conclusion, compatibilism and incompatibilism both concerns with moral responsibility, and the key issue here is the existence of free will, because it is necessary to claim moral responsibility. I have in this essay, firstly, explained the concepts of free will, moral responsibility and determinism; secondly, introduced the argument for incompatibilism including hard incompatibilism and libertarianism; thirdly, presented the argument for compatibilism which denies the idea of “ultimacy condition” of free will. Therefore, as the essay demonstrates that if determinism is true and incompatible with free will, then no one has free will, thus no one is morally responsible for anything. However, if determinism and free will are compatible, then moral responsibility would exist.