Monday, November 3, 2014

Hunter Stokes, Free Will Debate

Blog post 3

Hunter Stokes
Philosiphy
Free Will Debate

Libertarian-ism is the belief that humans have moral responsibility because they have spontaneous free will. Spontaneous free will is the ability to control your own actions and to have the power to alter the course or path of your own life. Libertarian-ism is basically just the belief that humans have the ability to change their own life by altering their actions and reactions.
Determinism is the belief that humans lack the ability to have free will over their lives or to have any control of their future. The deterministic belief basically eliminates moral responsibility which is a very radical explanation.
I believe that the more plausible theory is the theory of Libertarian-ism because it does not eliminate moral responsibility. My belief is that you have every ounce of responsibility for your personal actions and reactions that you have. You are in control of your body and the actions it does. Moral responsibility is avoided with Determinism as a cop out in my opinion. People just want to have a reason to not be responsible for the wrongful actions that they produce and this is a perfectly good explanation to get out of being responsible.
I also think that Libertarian-ism has more explanatory breadth because of its ability to explain more human behaviors. People that believe in determinism think that they are a product of the society that they were raised in or the family that brought them up. This can not be true in all cases however because there are some people that grew up to do horrible things and had a seemingly normal childhood and young adulthood. Libertarianism is more realistic because it would explain how people who came from nothing, and a terrible society became great people, and also how people who came from normal families in safe neighborhoods became terrible people.
In the matter of explanatory depth I believe the same thing because Libertarianism just explains the actions of human beings in a better way and in more detail. Libertarianism shows that humans should feel a moral responsibility for their actions in which most cases people do feel the responsibility. There is only a certain group of people that just doesn't feel like they have the moral responsibility for their actions on their conscious. Determinism in my opinion is just a get out of jail free card like the saying " Everything happens for a reason" is.
In the case of simplicity I believe that Determinism has the upper hand because it can be generalized in the phrase that I had mentioned before, Everything happens for a reason." Determinism is simple and easy to understand because it states that there is no moral responsibility due to the fact that humans do not have free will. And free will is explained not as spontaneous activity but as the inability to create your own actions and that they are all predisposed by psychological states. Therefore humans do have 'Free Will' even though there actions are completely determined in advance.
In the aspect of conservatism I believe that determinism may be closer because almost every single person I know has used the phrase " Everything happens for a reason" and believe it or not that is a Deterministic view. People want to feel free from moral responsibility so they think that maybe there is a supernatural being that is pre-controlling or mapping out their course of action to always work out for the best, but how does this explain innocent death and wrongful punishment. Determinism is in this day I beleive a more popular belief that is easier to understand and escapes responsibility.

1. Libertarianism and Determinism are the most plausable explinations of free will and human behavior.
2. Libertarianism seems to have more explanitory breadth and depth where as Determinism has simplicity and conservitism.
3. Therefore, Libertarianism is the best explanation of Human behavior and the discussion of free will.


1. Libe

2 comments:

  1. I agree with this comment "I believe that the more plausible theory is the theory of Libertarian-ism because it does not eliminate moral responsibility. My belief is that you have every ounce of responsibility for your personal actions and reactions that you have. You are in control of your body and the actions it does. Moral responsibility is avoided with Determinism as a cop out in my opinion. " I agree with this comment because people do use non logical reasoning to determine what they choose.

    I would argue that you do not necessary have to have full control of your mind and body. Every decision consists of an outside factor, no matter how much your want to try to avoid it. It also comes along with how you want the outcome to be. regardless of this debate in my option I feel that there are two sides to everything including what choices you make.

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  2. I like how you said that sometimes people do horrible things even though they seem to have a normal childhood. You can see examples if this if you watch the news. They will sometimes talk to a person's family, and they will say something like "I don't know how this happened. He was such a good person." Obviously we see here that the person being talked about chose to change something about himself without someone else's approval. Very good points.

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