What Is Free Will and Do We Have It, Essay Example

It seems like the question of free will exists as long as the philosophy itself does exist and the debates over the meaning of free will and whether people can exercise it have been led by philosophers all over the world for more than two millennia. And nowadays this question is still open and it has major importance from ethical, religious, and scientific points of view.

So what is free will? According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy free will is an art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. So basically free will is about whether people have and can exercise control over their actions and decisions.

There are two other terms that are connected to free will and can’t be neglected while studying the concept of it. It is determinism and compatibilism. According to Suppes determinism is a concept based on an idea that future events are necessitated by past and present events combined with the laws of nature (242). So according to this concept all the actions of a person that will occur in the future are already determined by the present events thus there is no free will. Determinism is often seen from the viewpoint of God’s existence who is the one that knows and determines all that humans are going to do (theological determinism). There is also biological determinism that states that actions of people are fixed on the genetic level thus everything humans do is determined by our genetic inheritance.

On the other hand compatibilism states that determinism is compatible with free will (McKay and Johnson 114). According to compatibilism actions and choices of people are results of their preferences and desires and can’t be always predicted from the viewpoint of past events or laws of nature as determinism states.

Personally I prefer compatibilism and I truly believe that both free will and determinism do exist. According to my own life philosophy people always have to be morally responsible for their actions and decisions that they make while being conscious of what they are doing. And as far as I understand moral responsibility is the main part of free will that people can exercise. Another point which I find to be important while discussing free will is that it can be overridden by actions of other people. For example, in cases of rape or murder a person’s free will is taken away by actions and decisions of another person. However, if there no free will than there is nothing to take away and it is quite meaningless if we are talking about rape or murder. But on the other hand I also believe that some events that occur in people’s lives are already determined. But I would rather call it fatalism not determinism. I believe that some things are meant to be in our lives, but we always have free will in interpreting them. As well as we have freedom and free will to choose in what to believe in terms of whether our actions are determined by our genes, by God, or by laws of nature. It is like if we were standing on a crossroad. A crossroad and possible directions can be predestined, but it is always our own decision of which direction to choose.

So I come to a conclusion that free will and determinism can coexist and they do coexist in our lives. I prefer to believe that people always have the possibility to make their own decisions in life and that these decisions do matter something and have some influence on people’s lives. But on the other hand I understand that free will is like a perfection that could never be totally achieved, because what seems perfect to one person seems absolutely imperfect to another. The same is with free will – what one person can interpret as one’s own free will, another will interpret as determined event.

References

“Free Will.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 7 Jan. 2002. 1 Jul. 2009. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/>

McKay, Thomas, and David Johnson. “A Reconsideration of an Argument against Incompatibilism.” Philosophical Topics 24 (1996): 113-122.

Suppes, Patrick. “The Transcendental Character of Determinism”. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 18 (1993): 242-257.