Paradox Of Free Will

The paradox of free will involves the apparent incompatibility of the existence of free will and the existence of determinism. Free will claims that we make choices freely based on nothing but ourselves. Determinism claims that all events are causally determined, meaning that one event will naturally cause another event to happen. Since free will, determinism and incompatibility, cannot all be true, a paradox arises. I will begin by illustrating why some may be in favor of free will. Then I will explain why some may be in favor of causal determinism.

In the case of free will, one can claim that we have the capacity to experience the feeling of freedom when we perform certain acts. Also, we tend to treat others as if their will is free. For

According to Taylor “One who endorses the claim of universal causation, then and d the theory of causal determinism of all human behavior, is kind of fatalist- or at least he should be, if he is consistent” (Taylor, pg55). There are various reasons to believe in fatalism and hard determinism. Firstly, science has shown that we live in a deterministic world. There are relevant causes and laws of nature that can explain why things happen. Secondly, if we consider what might happen tomorrow, all we know is that something will or will not happen. Statements about the future are either true or false. An example of this is given in the argument from foreknowledge. The argument from foreknowledge relies on a being’s ability to know necessarily that someone would do X tomorrow making it necessary that you do X tomorrow. A possibly omniscient being would be a reason to believe in fatalism because truth is timeless, as is their knowledge of the truth. Thirdly, To say that each event is determined by prior causes means that it was/is bound to happen. In Pierre Simon Laplace’s essay, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities he says, “We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to

The key claim of Aristotle’s argument seems to be that, if one man affirms that an event will happen and another denies it, only one of the two must be speaking truly. Although Aristotle argues that future contingents are neither true or false. The fact that something is true entails only that the denial is false not that the denial is impossible. This argument also fails, because the fatalist argument has to do with unavoidability not impossibility. No one is able to avoid what is truly described because you cannot make something both true and false at