Pros And Cons Of Libertarian Free Will

Are we free? On one hand most of us have the clear mindset that we are, we feel and act free, we feel like we make all sorts of decisions, good or bad that lead to both beliefs (that we are and that we’re not free) but it has yet to be proven that somebody can just decide to change his or her beliefs in any which way. But, consider knocking someone out, or, for another example, I donate wheat to a third world country on a whim, just because I feel like it. This view that humans are more than capable of making entirely free actions is known as libertarian free will, or in other words the belief that some human actions are freely chosen by the person. To be perfectly clear, libertarian free will is nothing like political libertarianism, however, people who accept libertarian free will could be anything from political libertarians to socialists, they just think that we can act freely. So we have figured out that our thoughts and actions are free, but most of us also believe that every effect had a cause and that everything that happens now in the present is the result of something that happened in the past. This is what we know as determinism. Hard determinism on the other …show more content…
This is where a being can start a whole chain of causes that wasn’t caused by anything else. So people freely do things because they decide to do things. With this, agents can change the chain of events in the universe, they can make stuff happen on their own. But many philosophers find this idea not realistic. Where would these decisions come from? To clarify this I would say that “free decisions” the ones that aren’t caused by anything, would just appear. Hard determinists are capable of explaining why we feel free by explaining the ignorance of our deterministic reasons we make our choices. The reason libertarianism is plausible is because people take moral responsibility seriously, especially for their