Determinism And Free Will Essay

Free will’s existence is nearly impossible to determine but crucial to the morality of judgments. Without free will, it doesn’t stand to reason that a person can be held morally responsible for doing wrong because they had no ability to not do the wrong. Choice is the necessary factor in determining culpability. In the same way that hot soup cannot be held liable for burning someone, a person cannot be held liable for perpetrating a crime if they had no free will. The implications of the free will argument and logical causality are two resultant ideas-determinism and indeterminism. Some models attempt to bridge the two ideas in a compatibilist view. According to determinism, everything was caused by some other action or combination of actions so there is no true free will. Every decision that people think was made freely was just the logical outcome of a series of prior events and factors. It was the inevitable decision and outcome whether a person recognizes …show more content…
He attempts to clarify these by introducing the concept of invariable concomitance. In essence, “… there is an invariable concomitance between two classes of events; but there is no compulsion,” (Ayer 117). It cannot be proven that the reason something occurred was something else- only that as soon as one thing finished something else happened to start. It is assumed that the reason is causation, but it is not guaranteed. It could instead be happenchance that they as soon as one thing started the other finished. It could also just be a matter of chance that it happens to occur sequentially every single time. Ayer explains that every example of “causation” is actually invariable concomitance so every aspect of a person’s character that would normally be attributed to their genes and background are actually just invariable concomitance. Since it’s not causing their actions, they have free will except for in the two situations that he