Free Will and Determinism

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Free Will and Determinism
There debate over whether human beings have free will has raged on for eons. Beliefs vary depending on things such religion and upbringing. Christians, Muslims, and most other religions believe that they have been granted free will to do anything they please by a higher being. However, they also understand that their actions have consequences and that they are judged based on them. For those who do not share such beliefs, the question that lingers is whether they do have a free will or whether everything that happens is ordered and predetermined. The latter is commonly referred to as fate, destiny or even karma. It is a conviction that your life and the things that happen are out of your control. The view that the universe orders our actions and that we have no control over them is referred to as determinism.
Determinism comes in two forms; soft and hard. Hard determinism is an extreme form of determinism. The theory holds that none of us is free and that we do not have the luxury of choice or free will. Consequently, no individual can indeed act freely. Proponents of hard determinism argue that for human beings to be truly free, the decisions and choices they make (Campbell, O’Rourke and Shier 9) must not be predetermined or caused but instead, should be the result of choice. Therefore, free will means the ability to choose. For the hard determinist, free will does not exist for several reasons.

For starters, the person making the choices would have to be a new creature. A creature that is unaffected by wants and desires because most of the choices we make are borne from these wants and desires which in turn stem from our character. Our character is primarily affected by how we are raised as well as the environment that surrounds us.
Evidence to support hard determinism is all around us. Things happen for a reason, and in most instances, those motives are out of our control. Take, for example, a person’s birth. That particular individual does not decide when he or she is born, where or to who they are born, and the societal and cultural factors that surround them. People do not get to decide how they are brought up. Apart from our birth, our constitution or genetic make-up is out of our hands. Whether we are male or female is something that none of us can magically decide. By merely being human, it appears that most of the desires are inbuilt and we only come with them. For instance, no one opts to be hungry or thirsty. We just choose to eat or drink, but never to be hunger or thirst. They are all innate desires that are not within our control. There are a host of other things that are predetermined and only discovered at the time of your birth such as race and sex. Others you find as you go through life. You realize that humans are as different as they come. Some possess exceptional ability in athletics whereas others are just better at Math. A case can indeed be made of hard determinism.
Soft determinism argues that our actions and behaviors are as a result of causal events. It is possible for determinism and compatibility to exist at the same time. The theory also opines that human beings do have free will but define free will as the ability to act within one’s nature. The person’s character is shaped by things such as his or her upbringing, environment and hereditary factors. Put differently soft determinists contend with the idea that free will refers to doing what one wants. Anything that is not coerced, forced, constrained or compelled comprises of free will. Thus where the hard determinist would argue that being thirsty or hungry is something out of the realm of an individual’s control, the soft determinist would state that the same individual is free to drink water or eat.
Libertarianism seems to be a compromise between hard and soft determinism. It contends that there are some things such as decisions of the self that are unaffected by anything. A human being’s free will acts independently without any external interferenceCITATION Sch10 p 108 l 1033 (Schneider 108). Consequently, determinism does not exist. When faced with right and wrong, people have the free will to choose. However, libertarians also agree that our actions may be partially affected by external factors. That we can only act according to our nature but that our life is determined by factors such as genetic make-up, heredity, education and the environment.
We spend our entire lives questioning whether we are really in control of our lives and the things that happen to us and around us. Even before our birth, things seem to be out of our control. Our sex, race, and family are predetermined. After delivery, we are thrust into a life full of decisions that are made beforehand such as which schools we attend, what religion we subscribe to and who we fall in love with. All these lend credence to the theory of hard determinism rather than libertarianism or soft determinism.
Works Cited
BIBLIOGRAPHY Campbell, Joseph, Michael O’Rourke and David Shier. Freedom and Determinism. Massachussets: MIT Press, 2004. Print.
Schneider, Susan. Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Print.