If We Have Free Will Essay

If we live in a world where free will existed we would always be morally responsible for our actions because we always have options to do otherwise, this is known as the principle of alternate possibilities. For now let us assume that we live in a determinist world where our life events are predetermined would we be responsible for our actions even though we have no control over them? It is very hard to imagine how someone could possibly be responsible for actions they had no control over but beyond that we would have to accept that moral responsibility can coexist with determinism. Personally I feel even if we lived in a determinist world we would still be morally responsible for our actions for fact that you acted and your act caused consequences. …show more content…
For example as you all know we have the presidential election coming up and if people knew that they had no free will then no one would vote because regardless of what they do the consequence is already predetermined, but because we still feel like we have free will we will still vote because we feel like we can make an impact or at least that our actions come from our own decisions. Again let us assume that we live in a world where there is no free will and you are voting for a candidate and if that candidate wins why wouldn’t you be responsible for his victory? If we lived in a determinist world your decision was already predetermined but you wouldn’t know that if you feel like you have free will so you took action and that action had a consequence so you are responsible since your action caused it. To the rest of us who believe that we have free will assume that you made that decision on your own with no outside intervention. What makes this argument stand is the fact that there is no definite answer to rather our world is determinist or not, even people who believe that our world is predetermined still acknowledge that it is very important for us to feel like we have free will in order for humans to