Hierarchical Compatibilism Vs Causal Determinism

I’m not sure if we have free will. There are many arguments that suggest that we do not have free will and those arguments are called Hard Determinists. The opposite of those arguments are under the sub heading Soft Determinists, and a couple of them are called Traditional Compatibilism and Hierarchical Compatibilism. Before I discuss what each argument entails, there is a statement called Causal Determination. Causal Determination simply states that “all of our behaviors are caused”. Hard determinists agree with causal determinists because when you take causal determinism and hard determinism further and together, the statement suggests that since everything is already caused, there is no no free will, further meaning that there is no moral

Causation strictly means no freedom and no responsibility. A good example that backs this claim is that if a sixteen year old girl grows up her whole life in an environment that promotes violence and beating your child, because she too was beat as she grew up, you can’t blame her solely for beating the life out of her newborn when it cries. How do you blame a sixteen year old if she literally had no idea of what it was to love your child and console it when it cries? She didn’t know- she only knew one way. Another example of hard determinism is that Soft determinists, like hard determinists, agree with causal determination, but reject the idea of hard determinism. They believe in free will, even if everything is caused, and this argument is the Traditional Compatibilism. They believe that causation can be compatible with free will. One statement by the Traditional Compatibilists is “An action is free if it is the result of your own deliberation and not constrained”. By deliberation, it means that you as a person was able to think about your decision and make a choice. By constraints, Ayer means an event that subjected you in a place where you really had no choice, and there are thee of those situations: 1) Gun to the head. The gun to the head situation means that let’s say

Hierarchical Compatibilism would say that an animal primary instinct is based on environment and biology, whereas a human has more than just their environment and biology; a human can have a desire to not want a desire and that derives from a 1st order of desire. In this example, I’ll take smoking. Your first desire is to smoke. From there, let’s say that one hears of someone that because of their smoking, had to lose his legs or even for cancer from smoking. The 2nd order of desire derives from your new information but also because your 1st order of desire is no longer what you want- you want something new now. So a Hierarchical Compatibilist would say that your action is free if they are the result of 2nd order volitions and not your