Free Will: Determinism and Libertarianism Essay

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The debates on the topic of the existence of free will have been held by people for centuries. Yet, nowadays, there is still a lack of unity among philosophers, who usually tend to support one of three main ideas, hard determinism, soft determinism, and libertarianism. The first one constitutes a belief that there is no free will in nature and that all of the actions are already predetermined. In other words, there is always only one possible scenario for the future which will occur in reality. The second approach, soft determinism, attempts to reconcile the ideas of determinism and free will, which at first glance seem completely different. According to this perspective, a person can have multiple options for actions, but all of them are predetermined by the past (Huemer, 2016). Moreover, despite the fact that the person can do any of the actions, the past events eventually influence his decision to choose only one of the options.

Finally, the libertarian view on free will implies that the latter exists and it excludes the possibility of determinism. I think that this approach is most relevant and ultimately the true one because it clearly articulates the idea that reality can change depending on a particular choice made by people. It postulates that every moment when a person has to make a choice, they become aware of their freedom since they realize that they control the situation at hand. Libertarianism disproves the view of hard determinism since the latter does not have any evidence of the fact that all events are predetermined and simply rests on the idea that free will is an illusion. Thus, it makes it possible to adhere to libertarianism since it offers a sense of freedom of choice as its evidence. Similarly, soft determinism contradicts libertarianism because it assumes that actions can be both free and caused, which is incompatible with the idea of the sense of freedom of choice.

Reference

Huemer, M. (2016). Free will and determinism in the world of minority report. In S. Schneider (Ed.), Science fiction and philosophy: From time travel to superintelligence (2nd ed.) (pp. 104–113). John Wiley & Sons.

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