Free Will Vs Determinism Essay

Free Will and Determinism have been discussed by philosophers for many years. Free will is associated with moral responsibility, and alternative actions that “could have” been taken over the one chosen. Determinism is the opposite view, and is associated with universal causation, and a lack of free will. Determinists believe that a person’s actions are inevitable, they are dictated by a person’s experiences, they believe nurture, nature, and even a person’s genes determine their future actions. Because of this determinists believe people hold no moral responsibility for their actions. Both free will and determinism are faulty, they have problems within each one that the other tries to make up for, making them interdependent. Compatibilism is a combination of both Free Will and Determinism. I believe Compatibilism because when looked at individually, free will and …show more content…
You feel sick from the night before and have the decision to leave the room and find coffee, or stay and sleep more. You decide to sleep more, you had technically had free will, or so you think. What if the door was actually locked? And although you chose to sleep more, if you decided to leave you wouldn’t have been able to. This is when free will becomes faulty, and determinism comes in. A determinist might say, your choices the night before led you to wake up in that room. A determinist would go even further back, saying your parents, and your grandparents, were alcoholics therefore it was in your genes to become an alcoholic. Making it inevitable that you would go out on a Tuesday night, consume too much alcohol, and wake up in a locked room with no knowledge of where you are or how you got there. But the determinist would argue that it is not your fault because this was inevitable, it was pre-determined because of how you grew up. The larger fault in the determinists’ argument is what I call “the