Freedom: A Slavery of Choice?.

By: khairi janbek.

This subject is the most difficult to tackle, because it stretches the intellect of the best thinkers, let alone that of a humble pretender and novice like yours sincerely. Therefore, Please try to understand that I gave it my best shot, though my best shot may well not be good enough.

In most of our judgements about people we assume that, in some sense they chose freely to do what they did, or to believe what they do. We punish, condemn, or blame individuals for making certain choices, and decisions, and insist that they ought to have done something else, and if they had they would then be deserving of rewards and praise.

At the same time that we conduct ourselves morally and legally on the basis that human beings are free agents, and can make decisions of their own free will, we are being more and more aware that this sort of assumption is very wrong, because individuals are often more victims of cirsumstance and determinations beyond their control, than responsible agents.

The problem of judging the extent to which our so-called voluntary choices and actions really are voluntary, in the sense of being completely free, becomes even more difficult to decide when we know that we make the choices that we must make according to the factors which have influenced our development.

So, in order to to be morally responsible for some action, you must take that action freely. For example, if you see me drowning in alake and you are tied to a tree on the ground and cannot free yourself, then you are not morally to blame for not rescuing me. Likewise, if you are brainwashed, and ordered to commit a crime, you are arguably not responsible for committing that crime, because your freedom was impaired.

On the one hand, the world is deterministic. Therefore, given the way the world has been in the past and the pyhysical laws that govern it, there is only one way the future can be. Consider that also applies to your personal actions. At the moment just before you perform some action, given the way the world has been in the past and given the physical laws of the universe. there is only one possible outcome. Right now, it is physically determined what you will do at every moment in the future.

Does determinism of this sort erase moral responsibility?. If you commit some morally bad action, could you plead that the physical laws and past history of the universe were so configured that there was no alternative?

If you believe that free will and determinism are incompatible, then you must deny determinism or deny moral responsibility. If you deny determinism, then you have to believe that there is genuine causal indeterminism in the world, introduced by free agents like us; and the future history world is left indeterminate by the natiral laws, and we determine it through our actions. if you deny moral responsibility, you must hold that the world is deterministic and that therefore we lack free will. I would say personally, we are deterministically free agents. In other words, we are choiceless in the fact of having a choice.