Determinism, moral accountability, and free will.
What are free will and determinism, and how do these frame the way we view reality?
The notion of free will on a philosophical podium is something most people, including myself, have tried to avoid due to the complexity of the matter. I’m not writing here trying to tell you which pair of shoes you should wear to work, but I'm giving you a list of suitable options for you to choose at your own volition.
Libertarian free will.
What is free will? Now it is easy to confuse free will for political freedom or societal free will, such as rights and so on. Well, looking at free will from the philosophical lens, that is libertarianism. In its shortest of definition I could find, free will is the ability to make your own individual choices. The ability to do whatever you want, however you want, whenever you want, out of your own free cause. Libertarianism, or libertarian free will, argues that all actions and choices are all human. Neglecting the cause of any external factor and rejecting any form of determinism. That is to say a person has absolute freedom over his choices. Person A has multiple options or ‘alternate possibilities’ to choose from.
If person A chose ‘Option X,' you must have had the real, physical, and psychological power to choose ‘Option Y’ under the exact same circumstances and conditions.
The humanistic approach sees the individual at the heart of their destiny, actively making decisions and shaping their life rather than allowing external forces to shape it for them.
Determinism (specifically hard determinism)
And determinism is the concept that man's choices are eternally coerced by past factors or present factors that they have little or no control over. (prior cause) some doctrines of determinism, which are found in the multitudes of religion, following the same path of fate or destiny as predetermined by a God. Environmental factors, physical, chemical, biological, psychological, and a lot of all other factors that may or may not influence the actions and choices of a human being. People in certain situations will behave in a certain pattern. Certain experiences brew certain decisions. Certain occurrences of the past of present coerce your choices.
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If determinism is true, every physical and mental event has a cause, directly or indirectly.
Hard Determinists refuse to coexist with Libertarianism because they argue that if our actions are influenced by external factors or prior causes caused years before you were even born, then humans are not the ultimate author of their choices. Therefore, free will does not exist.
Then what about moral accountability? If we truly lived in a deterministic universe, then how do we hold people morally accountable for their actions? How do we even start to define theoretical abstractions that govern our society, like justice and peace, if all our actions are nothing but a ripple effect of biological and psychological causes? That’s exactly the question compatibilism answers.
Soft determinism or compatibilism.
This is the most popular and accepted view among modern academic philosophers. Compatibilists argue that the libertarian definition of free will is an impossible, magical standard. Instead, they redefine free will to fit within a predictable and plausible deterministic universe. The compatibilists bring forth a theory that sets up an interesting notion for both libertarians and determinists. Although there is a prior cause to certain events, humans still have freedom of action. The choice to do or want, but not the choice to will.
For example, let’s say you want to eat wheat bread, and nobody is forcing a gun to your head to make you eat it, and you successfully eat the bread. You acted freely. It doesn’t matter if your desire for wheat bread was determined by your biology or upbringing; what matters is that you wanted to do it, and you did it.
There may be prior causes, but man still has his freedom of actions; moral accountability in this sense is not judged by casualties like biological causes and other external factors, but moral justification is determined by the constraints.
You aren’t free to choose your desires (as philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously put it: “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills”).
Conclusion
Now it would be foolish of me to say that I have completely covered all that there is on the matter of free will and determinism. I would advise anyone that stumbles upon this lowly article of mine to pick up the book ‘Four Views of Free Will' by Martin Fischer and suffer themselves to read in order to reach the zenith of this topic.
