Pereboom's Argument Analysis

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In modern society, a lot of situations are not caused by free will like everyone likes to believe they have, but rather as a result of different preexisting events. These deterministic events are said to be a sequential cause as opposed to Rousseau 's dubbed "first cause"1 in which the cause of the event is not reliant on an external event. These sequential events are a prime example of the deterministic viewpoint on the free will debate, forming the angle that most situations are caused by preexisting forces, and most everything is just predetermined and the "free" will choices we do get are still influenced by these forces or new forces. Based on this assumption that free will doesn’t exist in its truest meaning of the word, Pereboom sets out to prove that the losses of …show more content…

The purpose of his theoretical world I believe, was to show how it is possible that free will doesn’t exist in society and it 's all a notion we want to believe but isn 't true. Pereboom 's work describes how lives would be changed by the removal of free will if determinism was assumed to be present to some degree, and as he described, there isn 't much variation from how society is now, which begs the question if free will exists in our society at all. It may be a question that remains open for interpretation for many years, much like the religious debate, and Pereboom 's work illustrates just how hard it could be to prove free will 's existence or otherwise by providing theoretical examples which mirror

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