Free Will and Determinism

1633 Words4 Pages

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.

Robert Kane begins by explaining that there are two types of freedom; surface freedoms and free will. Surface freedoms include being able to choose what movie to watch or what mayoral candidate to vote for during an election, while free will is much deeper and very limited. Kane refers to characters from Walden Two and the fact that they can have anything they desire because they have been conditioned and manipulated into not wanting anything that is not available to them. The characters have maximal surface freedom, but they lack deeper freedom of the will because their desires are created by someone else (Kane). Kane believes that there is something missing from Walden Two and that deeper freedom is not an illusion. He argues that if we are ultimately responsible for being what we are, there must have been various factors, including acts in society and our genetic make-up, that did not completely determine how we acted and that left something for us to be responsible for. Kane also talks about self-forming acts (SFAs), which are “choices or...

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...e thing applies to our example with Sara. These gaps in Kane’s argument can be filled with points from Pereboom’s argument which is why I believe Pereboom has the better argument.

Works Cited

Kane, Robert. "Free Will: Ancient Dispute, New Themes." Feinberg, Joel and Russ Safer-Landau. Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy. Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2013. 425-437. Print.

Pereboom, Derk. "Why We Have No Will and Can Live Without It." Feinberg, Joel and Russ Shafer-Landau. Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy. Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning , 2013. 443-455. Print.

Van-Inwagen, Peter. "Freedom of the Will." Feinberg, Joel and Russ Shafer-Landau. Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy. Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2013. 409-418. Print.

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