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Ethical decision making & moral judgment
Ethical decision making & moral judgment
Ethical decision making & moral judgment
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Amy is going to make cupcakes and sell them during the holidays. She is trying to figure out how much she should charge for a cupcake. If she sells it for 1 dollar, she cannot leave profit or if she sells it for 5 dollars, she cannot sell them all. How much Amy should charge for a cupcake?
According to determinism, the idea that Amy can choose whether she can sell it for a dollar or 5 dollar or some other price is a kind of illusion. All she can do is to do only one thing that is already decided. For example, when we play a dice, we think that it is possible to have every side of a dice but when it is thrown, only one side, for example, 5, is shown. It is not your choice but it is determined to have you 5. In other words, we believe that we
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For example, according to Skinner, the person who commits a crime does not have a real choice. He or she is already determined to commit a crime by environmental circumstances or a personal history such as genetics. So that, it makes committing a crime seems a natural and inevitable phenomenon. This hard determinism makes people give up the moral responsibility in a society and …show more content…
But, what if we have a free will? What if we can choose whatever we want and future will be changed by our choices and actions? According to indeterminism, we choose how to behave and what to do of our own free will and we take a responsibility of our actions or choices in a society. In other words, we have a freedom of will and freedom of act. Therefore, Amy can decide whether to sell it for a dollar or 5 dollar or some other price and sell it as she likes. What is exactly free will? It can say that people can have some choice in how they act and assumes that they are free to choose their behavior. Free will has much to do with ego (self). Free will is to have a mind of my own and choose. If you are threatened or forced to do something, it cannot say that you have done something through free will because you did not make up your own mind and choose to act. Sigmund Freud explained ego, consciousness and unconsciousness. Freud is a psychologist who developed a model of the mind which explains the characteristics of the mind’s structure and function. Freud stressed the importance of the unconscious mind and asserted that unconscious mind controls behavior. According to Sigmund Freud, unconsciousness is a primitive impulse and cannot be accepted socially, so that it should be suppressed.
“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.
In determining the free will of a human’s nature many philosophers want to solve the dilemma of determinism. The dilemma of determinism is as follows (Rowe, p.587):
Correspondingly, it is a problem due to the fact, if our own actions are not self-caused, then our desires and characters are caused by outside forces. In the same way, it is not a problem if the immediate cause of an action is our own desires and character, then that is sufficient for the action to be free. When given the ability to decide on your own, it is free will. For instance, a man was given a personal choice to commence. But he chose not to think and form a choice. Instead his friend made choices for the man. Basically, the man did not desire free will to decide on his own, he chose to be told what to
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.
The last few weeks of class we covered several different kinds of determinism from the various handouts we received. The hard determinist believe that everything happens in a causal fashion, that there is no free will and everything is predetermined. “We remember statements about human beings being pawns of their environment, victims of conditions beyond their control, the result of causal influences stemming from parents, etc.”1 These hard determinist think that the universe works like a clock. Everything has a causal effect onto the other and there is no free will or choice, that all the tiny variables added up to you making that choice. Hospers dives into the psychology and says that every choice you make is a predetermined factor
According to this theory, if determinism is correct, based any individuals past and prior experiences there is only one future that is possible for that particular individual. There are two different types of determinism: Hard determinism and Soft determinism. Both types of determinism have the same principles; that every action that happens in an individual’s life is determined on a physical level and that all life events are determined by previous life events.
Hard determinists believe that all actions and decisions are determined by a number of different causes. Every single mental event, choice, intention, decision, and our actions are no more than an effect of other equally necessitated event (Hondereich). For example, when you choose what to wear in the morning it’s affected by many different factors like society and what’s in style, the weather, if you’re religiously affiliated, and other things as well. Scientific evidence for this claim is tied to Isaac Newton 's Theory of Relativity that mentions that for every action there are positive and or negative outcomes. In a sense this is similar to the hard determinist theory. Our actions vary from wants, wishes, and motivations, which basically are caused by specific conditions as mentioned earlier. Freud stated that the factors such as wants and wishes are the result of psychological conditioning and that our suppressed feelings produced by the human psyche (Id, Ego and Super ego) come together uncontrollably later in life effecting all actions and decisions you will
Neither soft determinism nor hard determinism successfully reconciles freedom and determinism. Soft determinism fails as it presents a limited type freedom, and it can be argued that the inner state of the agent is causally determined. Hard determinism presents a causally sound argument, whilst ignoring the moral bases of our society. Due to the failure of these theories to harmonize the data, the metaphysical problem of freedom and determinism persists.
All in all, each view of the philosophy of free will and determinism has many propositions, objects and counter-objections. In this essay, I have shown the best propositions for Libertarianism, as well as one opposition for which I gave a counter-objection. Additionally, I have explained the Compatabalistic and Hard Deterministic views to which I gave objections. In the end, whether it is determinism or indeterminism, both are loaded with difficulties; however, I have provided the best explanation to free will and determinism and to an agent being morally responsible.
The problem of free will and determinism is a mystery about what human beings are able to do. The best way to describe it is to think of the alternatives taken into consideration when someone is deciding what to do, as being parts of various “alternative features” (Van-Inwagen). Robert Kane argues for a new version of libertarianism with an indeterminist element. He believes that deeper freedom is not an illusion. Derk Pereboom takes an agnostic approach about causal determinism and sees himself as a hard incompatibilist. I will argue against Kane and for Pereboom, because I believe that Kane struggles to present an argument that is compatible with the latest scientific views of the world.
Determinism currently takes two related forms: hard determinism and soft determinism [1][1]. Hard determinism claims that the human personality is subject to, and a product of, natural forces. All of our choices can be accounted for by reference to environmental, social, cultural, physiological and hereditary (biological) causes. Our total character is a product of these environmental, social, cultural, physiological and hereditary forces, thus our beliefs, desires, values and habits are all outside of our control. The hard determinist, therefore, claims that our choices are determined by these factors; free will is an illusion because the choices and decisions we make are derived from our character, which is completely out of our control in creating. An example might help illustrate this point. Consider a man who has just repeatedly stabbed another man outside of a bar; the other man is dead. The hard determinist would argue that there were factors outside of the killer’s control which led him to this action. As a child, he was constantly beaten by his father and was the object of ridicule and contempt of his classmates. This trend of hard luck would continue all his life. Coupled with the fact that he has a gene that has been identified with male aggression, he could not control himself when he pulled the knife out and started stabbing the other man. All this aggression, and all this history were the determinate cause of his action.
McDonald's isn't healthy. Everyone should know that and even the company itself has come to terms with it in recent years. However, they are trying to change their reputation. Gone are the pink slime chicken McNuggets. A new recipe is here that will make fast-food lovers feel better about their bad choices. Here are five things to know about it.
Freedom, or the concept of free will seems to be an elusive theory, yet many of us believe in it implicitly. On the opposite end of the spectrum of philosophical theories regarding freedom is determinism, which poses a direct threat to human free will. If outside forces of which I have no control over influence everything I do throughout my life, I cannot say I am a free agent and the author of my own actions. Since I have neither the power to change the laws of nature, nor to change the past, I am unable to attribute freedom of choice to myself. However, understanding the meaning of free will is necessary in order to decide whether or not it exists (Orloff, 2002).
This is opposite of what determinism claim. Determinism, as it is taught in ITT-Tech textbooks, claims that moral judgements are pre-determined, and there exist no other course of action. For example, those who believe in determinism would argue that I did not decide to write this paper of my own free will, but that it was predermined that I would write it, and therefore, I wrote this paper. However, I believe this to be just another groundless argument that deflects individual responsibility onto something or someone else. If a person's actions or moral judgements are predetermined, then it presuposes that a person does not have the free will to do something else. If this were true, then we can not justifiably hold someone accountable for their actions, thus, it requires us to abandon the notion of individual responsibility, accountability, and achomplishments (perhaps in our country we already
Hard determinism taught that each of our actions is determined by factors beyond our control such as heredity and environment. From this point of view there can be no real moral responsibility for our actions if our actions were determined by factors beyond our cont...