It is not easy to have one of your moral beliefs challenged. Free will is something a lot of people believe in and it is why humans are suggested to have moral responsibility. What would it be like to find out that we as humans do not have free will and that all of our actions are determined based on our past experiences? Deciding whether humans have free will or not is an immense task. There are many arguments to suggest that we have free will and there are others to suggest that we do not and that our acts are completely determined. This is the battle of the libertarians against the determinists.
Before contemplating the idea of free will, there was no doubt in my mind that we as human had choices in every situation and we got to choose
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Hard determinism is factual, it can be applied to all of our acts, and there is no valuable evidence to destroy this view. Moral responsibility and punishment are the two arguments that philosophers use against determinism. Hard determinists believe that moral responsibility does not exist because we do not have the choice to make our decisions. This also makes it difficult to punish people because there is no way to stop someone from doing an act in the eyes of the determinist. Moral responsibility and punishment are arguing the same idea, which is easily rebuked by the determinists. Many determinists feel that punishment is not justifiable because all acts are determined and these false acts they will be committed anyway. Some determinists, like Hospers, have a different view on punishment. Hospers believes in hard determinism, yet he still believes there is a reason for punishment. He believes that even though the false acts were completely determined, “they (the ones committing the act) must be removed from society for our own protection” (Hospers, 352). The view of the determinist is simple; our actions are determined by our previous causes, but we must still punish those who commit false actions in order to protect society. While it may not be justifiable to punish those who’s actions were determined, it is a way to change their behavior and keep the rest of society safe. Hard determinism simply states that all of our acts are completely necessitated by previous causes and there is no way we can use a free act to choose another path because free will does not