If a person commits murder because of traumatic experiences that occurred during their childhood, are they guilty or innocent? Are their actions determined by the past, or are those choices freely made? Free will has been a debated subject for a very longtime. Many philosophers have tried tackling this issue with no success to finding the existential answer. Free will is defined as the ability to make your own decisions throughout life. The opposing belief is that everything is determined and everything that occurs has a cause behind it, we call this determinism. Free-will and determinism are very different philosophies, despite their differences they can coexist with each other. While there are many different philosophies that try to tackle this issue, for this paper I will be going in depth on the main arguments for this issue which include, Determinism, Freewill, and Compatibilism.
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Compatibilist argue that determinism is compatible with free-will. They believe that free-will can be absent or present, determined by the situation. For example, if someone tells you to eat, but there is no food, are you free to eat? No. On the contrary if someone tells you to eat, but you don’t out of protest, is that free? Yes. If you steal bread because it looks good, it is free will. What if you steal bread because you are being held a gunpoint is that a free decision? No. When it comes to the court-of-law, the court makes judgment of whether or not the individual is acting under free-will. In this case Roberts childhood did have an impact on his life and how he lived it, but he was not at gunpoint when he decided to pull the trigger that May afternoon. This ties into aspect of moral responsibility. Without moral responsibility and free will, all actions caused by humans or nature are determined and in the world we live in all individuals are responsible for their actions whether they are good or
Compatibilist argue that determinism is compatible with free-will. They believe that free-will can be absent or present, determined by the situation. For example, if someone tells you to eat, but there is no food, are you free to eat? No. On the contrary if someone tells you to eat, but you don’t out of protest, is that free? Yes. If you steal bread because it looks good, it is free will. What if you steal bread because you are being held a gunpoint is that a free decision? No. When it comes to the court-of-law, the court makes judgment of whether or not the individual is acting under free-will. In this case Roberts childhood did have an impact on his life and how he lived it, but he was not at gunpoint when he decided to pull the trigger that May afternoon. This ties into aspect of moral responsibility. Without moral responsibility and free will, all actions caused by humans or nature are determined and in the world we live in all individuals are responsible for their actions whether they are good or