Free will

Freewill: Student: Course: Tutor: Institution: Date: Freewill is necessary for the existence of morality, right and wrong as well as good and evil. In its absence, all human behaviour would be pre-determined hence no room for creativity and or choice. The problem arising from the issue of freewill and morality is that; is there anything like freewill if everything is pre-determined? In the ethical context therefore, are we supposed to praise or blame a person for their actions or accomplishments? When it comes to matters of religion, if God already knows the choices that we are bound to make given a certain circumstance and if he has made it so in the first place, then to what extent are we free to sin or not to sin. The existence of this problem has led to the arguments for compatibilism and incompatibilism though neither compatibilists nor incompatibilists dispute the fact that human beings make decisions in their daily lives. While the incompatibilists try to show that either determinism is false or that indeterminism must hold the compatibilists tend to question the assumption of the past being “fixed in some way” or basing on Hume’s suggestion that some kind of determinism is necessary for the existence of freewill. Causal determinism has its basis on the causality principle which states that “the future does not influence the past” but rather “the cause event comes before the effect event in time.” Causality governs most of human beings macrocosmic existence aspects. The inherent unpredictability of microcosmic events inserts the randomness extends its threads into the macrocosmic world hence allowing for an indeterminate future. Hobbes and Tolstoy in trying to explain about the freewill argued that we are free in so far as we may do as we wish without being hindered or constrained an idea that was favoured by the contemporary empiricists. Locke and Hume extended this to “the power to do as one wills or not” hence relating freedom strictly to a person; an ability restricted to the person and not a freedom of the will. In order to solve the problem of freewill and morality, we have to introduce the issue of limited freewill as well as limited determinism. According to Spinoza (1673), reality does not constitute of minute particles acted upon by external forces as dominated by the concepts of sir Newton but is continuous and dynamic as explained by the wave structure of matter. According to him, as illustrated by the swinging pendulum, there are many possible futures in the rather non-determined universe that is necessarily connected. Human beings can learn from the effects of taking chance decisions on their lives to ultimately have enough knowledge concern...