Question

Before completing this assignment, be sure to read and view the instructional materials for this week, specifically the ones on personality and how it defines us. Then, answer the following question in no more than two typed pages, double-spaced:

Is "free will" a fiction? In other words, once we have found external causes for our behavior, is there less need to attribute to an internal act of will? Explain and/or provide examples to support your response.

Answer 1

• I do feel I have free will,since I make the decision of going out for attending a concert,I feel I have chosen to do something myself.Yet many philosophers say this instinct is wrong. According to their view, free will is a figment of our imagination. No one has it or ever will. Rather our choices are either determined necessary outcomes of the events that have happened in the past or they are random.
• We all like to think we have free will. It's comforting to know that every day we weigh up options (coffee or tea?), make a choice (coffee), and have some semblance of control over how our lives play out.In other words, we're not actually making decisions, we're just telling ourselves we did. I guess its just comforting for all of us to think that we are making decisions on our own rather than anything else but circumstances around us sometimes make us take certain decisions.
• Consider a simple example: I walk into a take-out restaurant, try to decide whether I want to have coffee or tea, decide I want coffee and order it. From a commonsense point of view, this seems like a clear case of a free action (i.e., my exercising my free will).Granted, if things had gone differently I might have ended up ordering tea. So, for example, if someone in front of me in line had been raving about how great the tea was in this place (or maybe about how bad the coffee was) then I might have chosen differently.  It tells us that what we meant when we said I made a free choice to order a coffee wasn't just that if the situation had unfolded differently then I might have ordered differently.
• Deterministic explanations for behavior reduce individual responsibility. A person arrested for a violent attack for example might plead that they were not responsible for their behavior – it was due to their upbringing, a bang on the head they received earlier in life, recent relationship stresses, or a psychiatric problem. In other words, their behavior was determined.