Free-Will Vs Determinism

The words on this page -- are they written as a predetermined set of circumstances or by an agent free of any influence? Are human beings essentially cogs on a colossal, universe scale robot, or are they sentient beings who are uninfluenced by the order of the universe? Ultimately, it is a question of free will, a philosophical question heavily debated from even the time of Democritus back in the 400s BC, who stated that from the atomic level, everything in the universe is pre-ordained (Nash, 2013, p. 327), to today. It is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to objectively determine what is the correct answer; as scientifically speaking, just about everything humanity observes in the universe has an explanation. Who’s to say, then, that human

The least popular, but one of the more logical, is called hard determinism (Blackburn, 2008). Determinists believe that everything is caused by something (Nash, 2013, p. 326), and hard determinists believe that the clash between free will and determinism is justification enough for the cancellation of free will; they believe that free will does not exist whatsoever (Blackburn, 2008). The second group, who holds the primary objection and alternative to compatibilism, are called libertarians. Libertarians believe that reconciliation between determinism and free will is somewhat possible (Blackburn, 2008). There are two distinct positions held by libertarians. The first one is the “Campbell position,” which claims that “there are some uncaused events: that, while for some events a causal chain (a chain of causal connections) can be drawn that leads invariably to them, another class of events involves breaks in such causal chains” (McFee, 2000, p. 54). Campbell believed that actions that were done from desires are not done of free will, and actions that are done from duty are free will (p. 54). The other position held is the position of uncertainty, which is rooted in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (p. 60). This argument relies on science over duties and how one feels. Essentially, this argument holds that it is impossible to predict elementary particles using causal events, so free will could still be

This is done by changing the previously used definition of free will. Free will is actually found in the manifestation of human desire, their wants. Foley (1978) states that “the crucial assumption upon which compatibilistic accounts of the ability to act are founded in the assumption that although actions, like all other happenings, are causally necessitated by prior conditions,” these are not to be discussed when concerning free will (p. 421). So, in a sense, compatibilism rejects what libertarianism impossibly tries to justify, which is why it is the stronger argument. Even if everything is predetermined, and it is not possible to truly make a decision, a man still has free will because he feels like and wants to make that decision. In a lot of ways, a compatibilist is much like a hard determinist in terms of basic beliefs, but they add the possibility of free will by changing what it means to be free. Libertarians attack compatibilism for this reason, but “on what grounds are we prepared to show that the bounds of ordinary usage are correct in this case?” (Nash, 2000, p. 340). In other words, free will could be being misinterpreted by Libertarians, they could be trying to prove something that is