Defend a position on free will and determinism Free Essay Example, 2250 words

Frankfurt relates his theory ‘hierarchical mesh. ’ The idea is that an individual can have conflicting desires at a first-order level and also have a desire about the various first-order desires (a second-order desire) to the effect that one of the desires prevails over the others. A persons will is to be identified with her effective first-order desire, i.e. , the one that she acts on. The theory has been criticised, as it does not explain how the various levels of desire in the hierarchy work together (Wegner, 2003). Dennett has another reasoning for truth of compatibility. By excluding God, who is all-knowing and powerful, we shall put the future in chaos for all the finite beings, due to our inadequate knowledge of the current state of the world. He further says because individuals have the ability to act differently from what anyone expects free will can exist. Incompatibilists oppose the idea by their argument that we may be mere robots responding in predictable ways to stimuli in our environment". Therefore, all of our actions are controlled by forces outside ourselves, or by random chance (Wegner, 2003). INCOMPATIBILISM One of the traditional arguments for incompatibilism is based on an "intuition pump": if a person is determined in his or her choices of actions, then he or she must be like other mechanical things that are determined in their behavior such as a wind-up toy, a billiard ball, a puppet, or a robot. We will write a custom essay sample on Defend a position on free will and determinism or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/pageorder now Because these things have no free will, then people must have no free will, if determinism is true. This argument has been rejected by compatibilists such as Daniel Dennett on the grounds that, even if humans have something in common with these things, it does not follow that there are no important differences (Kane, 2001). "Causal chain" is another argument for incompatibilism. It asserts that free will means that man must be the "ultimate" or "originating" cause of his actions. To be responsible for ones choices is to be the first cause of those choices, where first cause means that there is no antecedent cause of that cause. The argument, then, is that if man has free will, then man is the ultimate cause of his actions. As per determinism, on the other hand, all of man’s choices are caused by events and facts outside his control. So, if everything man does is caused by events and facts outside his control, then he cannot be the ultimate c ause of his actions. Therefore, he cannot have free will (Kane, 2001). Carl Ginet in the 1960s gave a third argument for incompatibilism.