1. The difference between compatibilism and indeterminism is that compatibilism is “the thesis that both determinism and free action can be true” (602). This means that they believe that every event is because of another event and that each person is able to make their own actions and decisions. Indeterminism is “the thesis that at least some events in the universe are not determined, are not caused by antecedent conditions and may not be predictable” (608). Indeterminism is different from Compatibilism because indeterminism believes that every event is independent of another events and cannot be predicted from other events that have taken place unlike compatibilism.
3. Hard determinism is a problem for moral judgment because hard determinism says that a person is not held responsible for their actions and therefore does not allow free will. Our moral judgement is our decision between right and wrong but with hard determinism you aren’t held responsible for your wrong actions. This is causing a problem for moral judgement because we aren’t responsible for our wrong actions because our decisions cannot cause our action. Also is saying that “human freedom and determinism is not compatible” to one another. The textbook says that hard determinists believe that “we can only barely be said to be ‘acting’ at
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The problem of mind/body dualism is because the mind and body are “two separate substances” (334). This affects the issue of free will because the mind has the ability to think and have a conscious but does not have the ability to move or make actions. According to Descartes, the mind has senses as of thirst and hunger but the body has senses of pain whereas the mind cannot feel pain. Having the mind and body separate means that even if the mind thinks one thing the body has the ability to do another. If these two were together as one substance then they would correspond together. The mind and body may be two separate substances but cannot exist on their
Based on the article ‘Compatibilism’ written by W.T. Stace, he explained about the reconciliation between free will and causal determinism. He tries to reconcile both of these by adopting a compatibilist view of freedom. Firstly, it says that free will is related with morality which means if one is absent, so the other. We appear to be free, however, determinism suggests that every actions that we did are determined by previous events that happened to us that we have no control over it.
“There is a continuum between free and unfree, with many or most acts lying somewhere in between.” (Abel, 322) This statement is a good summation of how Nancy Holmstrom’s view of free will allows for degrees of freedom depending on the agent’s control over the situation. Holmstrom’s main purpose in her Firming Up Soft Determinism essay was to show that people can have control over the source of their actions, meaning that people can have control over their desires and beliefs, and because of this they have free will. She also tried to show that her view of soft determinism was compatible with free will and moral responsibility. While Holmstrom’s theory about the self’s being in control, willingness to participate, and awareness of an act causes the act to be free, has some merit, her choice to incorporate soft determinism ultimately proved to invalidate her theory.
When addressing the mind and body issue, there are often multiple explanations. Out of those multiple explanations, Dualism and Materialism are the ones to stick out. Dualism stands on the ground that the mind and body are two fundamentally different things. There is in no way that you can make a distinction between the two. For no one can explain how a non-physical entity can affect a physical body. On the other hand Materialism (aka physicalism) stands the ground that there is only one entity in the world, which has to be physical. That everything in the universe has meaning in physical terms, for the brain is the mind.
In life we are constantly questioning why people act the way they do. A determinist would say that freedom of choice couldn’t always be possible because our actions are determined by things that are way beyond our control. This view is known as the most extreme form of determinism; hard determinism. A hard determinist would believe there is no free will it’s an illusion everything is determined. Everything happens because of physical laws, which govern the universe. Whether or not we do well in life is far beyond our control. We may seem to have a choice but in reality we don’t. We shouldn’t blame people or praise people it wasn’t their choice. We are helpless and blind from start to finish. We don’t have any moral responsibilities. Some causes that are put forth by determinist are human nature; which means people are born with basic instincts that influence how they act. Another is environmental influence, which simply means people are shaped by their environment conditioned by their experience to be the kind of people they are. Also, social dynamics, which mean’s social creatures that are influenced by social force around them and psychological forces, which is people, are governed by psychological forces.
P. F. Strawson was an English philosopher that fought strongly for the idea of compatibilism. Compatibilist see that libertarian free will and hard determinism are extremely different and there must be a compromise. Free will says that a human's actions are freely decided by the agent, while hard determinism argues that all past events will determine what is to come in the future. Compatibilism believe that in a mix of both libertarian free will and hard determinism. This is also known as soft determinism. The ideology of compatibilism says that both an action is determined, that is, that it must happen, but it can also be self-determined. But, where do we draw the line? What parts of our life are determined for us? What actions do we decide? These are all questions that come up for those who argue against
Richard Taylor explained why the body and the mind are one, and why they are not two separate substances. In the article “The Mind as a Function of the Body”, Taylor divides his article in a number of sections and explains clearly why dualism, or the theory that the mind and the body are separate is not conceivable. In one of these sections it is explained in detail the origin of why some philosophers and people believe in dualist metaphysics. As stated by Taylor “when we form an idea of a body or a physical object, what is most likely to come to mind is not some person or animal but something much simpler, such as a stone or a marble”(133). The human has the tendency to believe a physical object as simple, and not containing anything complex. A problem with believing this is that unlike a stone or a marble a human (or an animal) has a brain and the body is composed of living cells (excluding dead skin cells, hair, and nails which are dead cells). The f...
Hard determinist view free will as incompatible with determinism, and therefore it does not exist. These philosophers, however, define free will as making decision in a random, uncaused way. B.F. Skinner would be an example of a hard determinist, where he simply does not accept the existence of freedom of will. David Hume, a 17th century philosopher, helped bring about soft determinism. He was the first to argue that maybe the root of the free will problem lied in the definition of free will. Instead of humans making decision in uncaused ways, maybe being free is doing what you want to do. By predicting what you want to do; to make you decision based on aspirations or desires, enables the concept of free will to work in the context of the determinist theory. Those who choose to accept both our choices being determined by outside factors, and accept that humans have the ability to make their own decisions based on these pressures, believe in the theory of compatibilism. Compatibilists, like A.J Ayer and Susan Wolf, define and defend their acceptance of both determinism and the existence of free will. Ayer finds two issues with “hard” compatibilism. He doubts that every event has a direct cause, which is at the core of determinism. While scientists have laws and theories that determine how actions are caused, like gravity and motion, there are still phenomena that science cannot explain their causes.
The objection is: if the mind and the body are completely separate and independent entities, then how can these two entities come together to create the human being as we know it? This is a common argument among physicalists and non-substance dualists, such as Princess Elizabeth in her letter responding to Descartes’ sixth meditation. For example, because of the nature of the human experience, the joint connection between the mind and the body is what causes physical movement. We think about moving our arm or leg, and our arm or leg moves in the physical world. Therefore, there is a question as to how a mind and a body could come together to create this
Free will is the ability for a person to make their own decisions without the constraints of necessity and fate, in other words, their actions are not determined. Determinism is the view that the initial conditions of the universe and all possible worlds are the same, including the laws of nature, causing all events to play out the same. Events are determined by the initial conditions. Two prominent positions advocated concerning the relation between free will and determinism are compatibilism and incompatibilism. In this essay I shall argue that compatibilism is true. Firstly, I shall explain what compatibilism is and consider possible objections and responses to the theory. I shall then examine incompatibilism and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses and argue that compatibilism is a stronger argument and, as a result, show why it is also true.
Soft determinism touts itself as a looser form of determinism; it maintains that a modicum of freedom can exist within determinism. For the soft determinist, the personality or character of the agent is still derived from environmental, social, cultural, physiological and hereditary factors. The agent’s actions are still a result of this character. However, the soft determinist maintains that we are free because freedom is not a freedom from all causes but is a freedom from some causes. One might argue that there was no compulsion in the action of the killer; he knows the consequences of his actions and is aware that murder is wrong. If someone held a gun to his head and told him to stab the other individual, we could not rightly state that his actions were free if there is some external compulsion. His personality is created within a context that instills certain societal values and norms of behavior...
Dualism claims that the mind is a distinct nonphysical thing, a complete entity that is independent of any physical body to which it is temporarily attached. Any mental states and activities, as well as physical ones, originate from this unique entity. Dualism states that the real essence of a person has nothing to do with his physical body, but rather from the distinct nonphysical entity of the mind. The mind is in constant interaction with the body. The body's sense organs create experiences in the mind. The desires and decisions of the mind cause the body to act in certain ways. This is what makes each mind's body its own.
. There are two kinds of dualism. One is Substance dualism which holds that the mind or soul is a separate, non-physical entity, but there is also property dualism, according to which there is no soul distinct from the body, but only one thing, the person, that has two irreducibly different types of properties, mental and physical. Substance dualism leaves room for the possibility that the soul might be able to exist apart from the body, either before birth or after death; property dualism does not. A substance dualism is something with "an independent existence". It can exist on its own. This holds that each distinct non-physical entity mind composed a different kind of substance to material objects. Substance dualist believed only spiritual substances can have mental properties. It is “soul” along with certain memory and psychological continuities that constitutes the survival of the person. Physical properties of property dualism are properties like having a certain weight, conducting electricity and mental properties are properties like believing that 1+1=2, being in love, feeling pain, and etc. Property dualism allows for the compatibility of mental and physical causation, since the cause of an action might under one aspect is describable as a physical event in the brain and under another aspect as a desire, emotion, or thought; substance dualism usually requires causal interaction between the soul and the body. Dualistic theories at least acknowledge the serious difficulty of locating consciousness in a modern scientific conception of the physical world, but they really give metaphysical expression to the problem rather than solving it.
The idea that one event causes another and so on is so common in everyday life that we have become accustomed to it. Hard determinism takes the very strict stance that every event is determined by a unique set of conditions and acts according to the physical laws of nature. Soft determinism also defends the causal approach of hard determinism unlike indeterminism, which, on the other hand, refutes the principle of causality entirely. The hard determinist notion of causality is very rigid and stems largely from the thinking of classical mechanics. It implies that with all of the proper information it would be possible to calculate and predict some future event with certainty. For example, if one were to analyze drug addiction from the stance of hard determinism then biochemical imbalances in the brain and physical dependency on the drug are what cause addiction. In other words, addiction is due to physical conditions both pre-existing and transient in the addict’s
Mind-body dualism is usually seen as the central issue in philosophy of the mind. The problem with mind-body dualism is that it is unknown whether the mind really is a separate entity from the human body as Descartes states in his argument, or whether the mind is the brain itself. Descartes believed that in a person existed two major components, the physical body and the nonphysical body which was called the mind or soul. As a scientist, Descartes believed in mechanical theories of matter, however, he was also very religious and did not believe people could merely be mechanical creatures that ran like “clockwork.” And so, it was Descartes who argued that the mind directed thoughts. To account for this, he split the world into two parts, the scientific world and the mental world. The scientific world was all that was physical, like the human body. The mental world was the mind which could not be seen or touched. Thus, mind-body dualism was created. If the mind could not be seen or touched, how could it possibly interact with the human body and so, how do we know if it even exists? Also, how would we know if other minds exist if we cannot make contact with other minds? Questions like these are what made Descartes’ version of dualism improbable and led to different theories of the mind such as physicalism, which is the belief that the mind is just a result of brain states such as nerve impulses in certain areas of the brain.
If there is no room for choice or chance then everything happens without an individuals responsibility of doing something, mean that people can not be held to their actions, because individuals are not able to chose their actions no matter how virtuous or viscous they may be, as all their actions are all already predetermined. The idea of hard determinism refutes the idea of if-then statements because human choices and actions are not taken into factor because under hard determinism humans are not responsible for our actions. Hard determinism received its greatest influence from the physicist Isaac Newton, and his studies in physics and his idea of the universe as “matter in motion”. People who believe in Newton’s “matter in motion” theory who also believe in hard determinism applied the idea to everything in the universe, that everything is just matter in motion including humans, who need to obey the laws of nature just as anything else needs