Free will alludes to the right of individuals to be free and whether such freedom can actually be realized in a world so much perceived to have predetermined events.
What then is freedom and if freedom doesn’t exist what negates the concept of freedom and what implications would this denial of its existence mean to society. Freedom may simply mean the ability of an individual to act without interference and the basis of these actions being voluntary choice. The discussion of free will and determinism is complex and has seen vast divisions on the stand of distinguished philosophers over the historical discourse of philosophy
Free will therefore is a concept that gives rise to freedom as a guide to regulating the interaction of persons’ in society through the development of guiding principals and laws that seek to promote and protect personal freedom. In this regard constitutions that have moral, personal and legal force tend to be formulated in order to respect the freedom of individuals and any attempts to infringe on the same leads to conflicts in an attempt to redress this grave violation .Mill in his book “Liberty” hailed freedom as the greatest of all human virtues while Hume declared “how glorious it is to be free”.
Therefore freedom is important for personal happiness since happiness can only be achieved when individuals are not hindered in their pursuit of factors that give joy and pleasure as long as those actions are within the confines of equitable and ethical legal guidelines. Therefore freedom have an element of voluntary action and therefore these free actions leads to consequence broadly termed as responsibilities emanating from possession of freedom .This is because actions both good and bad leads to praise or blame and the resultant effect is either reward or punishment respectively.
The Essay on Stanley Fish's View On Free Speech With A Personal Opinion
In the essay in his recent book, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and it’s a Good Thing Too,” Fish argues that free speech “is not an independent value, but a political prize,” and any differences, which the courts have drawn between, protected and unprotected expressions are “malleable.” Like any other concept, the principle of free speech is, ...
Questions arise therefore whether one can be held responsible for actions deemed to be involuntary, since responsibility is basically deemed to originate from freedom. There are instances whereby legal responsibility and my emphasis is on “legal” since it is unclear whether there can be involuntary acts basing my argument on the basic understanding that an individual must make a choice to act in a particular manner disregarding whatever undue pressure forcing him to act in another way. These instances include insanity, drunkenness and intoxication, coercion, great provocation and certain cases of ignorance.
Determinism is the theories that our choices and decisions and what give rise to them are effects. Some have argued along the same line of thought and has termed our basis of all choice and decision as having resulted from the causal affect of nature. Maybe however, though things happen as they will it ought to be clear that such actions may be so simply because we choose to act in such a fashion and therefore the presupposition that such actions were predetermined may be fallacious. However, cause does not always imply different effect since the latter may require a series of unrelated condition for it to occur. For instance it would be expected that by striking a match, light would occur. This simplistic view of causal effect would not apply if for instance the match had been wet, and this implies though to a small extent that determinism lacks sufficient visible justifications to hold.
As I wind up it is important therefore to acknowledge in my humble view that though human beings may find themselves in circumstances that they feel are not of their choosing it is clear that we do have a choice on how to react to them.
Therefore to claim that human beings are not free is to precipitate a crisis of unprecedented level where such arguments though plausible as they may seem might be used to deny citizens their freedom. My believe therefore is that there is sufficient literature to support that human beings are essentially free and that determinism is simply a bi-product of individual and communal choices since a person cannot live in isolation and the choices made by others may influence greatly an individual’s life and limit but only to an extent his power to act in a certain way.
The Term Paper on Common Sense Freedom Free Statement
Assignment: Comment on the Following Statements 1) Out of the people edited in Abel or discussed by Palmer, the following are hard determinists... Well, Palmer only discusses two hard determinists: B. F. Skinner, and Sigmund Freud. Out of the texts read in Abel, Abel discusses Skinner and D'Holbach as hard determinists. 2) Hard determinism conflicts with some of our ordinary beliefs and ...
References
Bertsky, B. (1966).Free will and Determinism: Meaning of Determinism. New York:
Harper & Ray publishers.
Brooks, C. (1961).Determinism and Freedom in the age of modern science: Justification for Freedom. New York: New York University Press
Honderich, T. (1993).How free and you: Freedom as a Right. Suffolk: Clays Ltd.
