Hard Determinism And Free Will Essay

Free will is the ability to act out of one's own volition; to make a choice where you could have possible chosen to do something else. Freedom is being able to act in a way that is not predetermined. There are 3 broad philosophical approaches to the concept of free will. Firstly, hard determinism, which states that we have no free will and therefore cannot be held morally responsible for our actions. Secondly, we have soft determinism (compatibilism), which says that both determinism and free will are true and so we can be held morally responsible. And thirdly, libertarianism, which says that we do have free will so we can held morally responsible. Each approach using a different understanding of how free we really are and how much moral responsibility we have. There is an important relationship between free will and moral responsibility, it is generally thought that we can be held morally responsible for actions that we freely perform. I will be presenting the 3 approaches and argue for why hard determinism is true- that we are not free and cannot be held morally responsible for our actions.

As stated, hard determinists do not believe in free will and so also

Metaphysical libertarianism, opposed to political libertarianism, is concerned with whether or not we are actually free as beings. This is what I will be looking at. Libertarianism is the belief that free will does exist and so we can be held morally responsible for our actions. Contrasting to hard determinism, it rejects the idea that our actions are predetermined by causes outside our control and that we are not morally responsible. Libertarians are similar to hard determinists, however, in the sense that they both agree that free will is incompatible with determinism. They just deny the claim that determinism is true and free will is