Without real freedom there would be no ethical decisions to make, Discuss.
"Without real freedom there would be no ethical decisions to make," Discuss.
In making ethical decisions you are exercising an ability to make
moral judgements and take moral responsibility. How does freedom tie
in with this? Does an action have to be undertaken freely for you to
be morally responsible for it? If an action is taken intentionally and
consciously then surely he who took the action is responsible for the
consequences of the action. So long as action was taken as a choice
between various other actions and was a deliberate choice then the
agent is accountable for the choice he made. If we can describe the
action as being either right or wrong or good or bad then we assume
that the agent took these factors into account when choosing to act.
This shows that he had the capacity for deliberate choice, and acted
freely towards his intentions. It was because he acted freely that he
became responsible for the act and because he chose to act in that way
when he was faced with a number of other choices he accepted his own
free will as an autonomous moral agent.
If an action is performed unintentionally or against will, then
surely the agent is not responsible for the consequences? He did not
have the freedom to decide and was unable to choose his actions and
so, a difference is specified between voluntary actions and
involuntary actions. Voluntary actions are those done through the
initiative of the agent out of free will and choice, whereas
involuntary actions are carried out through coercion or taken without
knowing the consequences of the act i.e. ignorance. The nature of an
involuntary act, in that it is done with a lack of reason or
intention, limits the extent to which the act can be described as
ethical. J.L.Mackie suggests that, "an agent is responsible for all
and only his intentional actions. [1][1]" When an agent is not
undertaking an action through choice and reason, the factors other
than his own free will influencing the decision can be physical, i.e.
violence or mental and based on emotions such as fear, passion or just
out of force of habit. If these factors limit your ability to make
decisions based on your own initiative then they are limiting to
freedom, so, are we free to decide?
Each one of us experiences restrictions to our individual freedom
and there are many ways in which our freedom, in reality, is limited.
By law we are restricted to acts that systems of government deem
acceptable, and further than that our actions and decisions, are
influenced and controlled by a number of social pressures. Social
conditioning requires the majority to act within a bracket of
normality and within bounds of what is socially acceptable and it
could be argued that what is considered and thought of as socially
acceptable, is basically so as a direct result of what is lawful. It
would be easily possible for people's morals to be largely influenced
by what is set out as right and wrong by the law as they have grown up
with that moral code in their mind. Someone who through no other
device than the law of their society has been told that smoking
cannabis is wrong, is still likely to consider it wrong if it is
suddenly made lawful, even though they do not seem to have any moral
or ethical reason to believe this. In this way this process of
indoctrination effectively limits us by influencing our morals and
giving us an accepted ethical code to take as your own.
Other limits to our freedom can be found within our own
personalities. Personal and psychological differences within people
will provide them with different abilities and hence different
freedoms and limitations. People can only act in the way that their
personalities allow them, by causing them to react to situations in a
specific way. We can define these types of restrictions as internal
and external. Internal freedom is that which allows us to think,
analyse and decide the way in which we want, and think it appropriate,
to act. Our external ...
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Other limits to our freedom can be found within our own
personalities. Personal and psychological differences within people
will provide them with different abilities and hence different
freedoms and limitations. People can only act in the way that their
personalities allow them, by causing them to react to situations in a
specific way. We can define these types of restrictions as internal
and external. Internal freedom is that which allows us to think,
analyse and decide the way in which we want, and think it appropriate,
to act. Our external freedoms, offered by society, law and any factors
other than that of our own mind and conscience allow us to physically
act on these decisions. This ties in with moral responsibility.
Without the internal freedom which allows us to deliberate, non of the
decisions we make can be truly ethical and we shouldn't be held
responsible for actions which have been taken with a compromised sense
of morality. Likewise, you can't be held responsible for an act that
you were prevented from taking, or similarly be held responsible for
the consequences of not taking it.
Freedoms and restrictions discussed here are done so within the
bounds of human society and are what we take as limitations to our own
free will. But what if free will is non existent and we are only
convinced we have self control because we are in fact controlled by
devices beyond our own perception. In this case everything is pre
determined and the choices we face are pre decided for us leaving us
with the illusion that we have chosen ourselves and decided our own
fate; exercised free will. This deterministic concept can be looked at
from three main perspectives, the first, hard determinism, considers
everything in the present to be directly caused by events that
preceded them. Everything including the actions we take and the
choices we make are caused directly by another event. Once the cause
of an event has occurred the event itself is destined to happen, it is
a constant chain of cause and effect which renders everything, in
principle, predictable[2][2]. People are just products of their
upbringing and social environment. Everything a human mind has
experienced is a cause and so everything it does is the result, even
though in theory we can make our choices based on conscience and
deliberation, the decisions we make are inevitable. Psychological and
sociological studies back this view up by investigating the
subconscious and looking motivations for our actions, possibly beyond
our conscious control. Each human mind is the product of its
experiences and in every situation will react according to what it has
learnt, in a similar way to a computer that has been programmed.
Warnock compares the human response to ones environment to animals
saying that if the theories suggested within hard Determinism are true
then humans can be trained, as animals can, to act differently.
However this links back with responsibility, if a human is trained to
perform a certain task they should receive no praise for correctness
in taking the action, as what they have done was done not out of free
will, but because they were programmed, or trained to do so. The
action says nothing about the moral worth of the agent as it had an
external cause, and was not done through free will and intention.
The hard determinist view that everything is decided by a constant
line of causes, and that humans are not free simply because every
thing we supposedly decide is already caused and so determined,
ultimately means that human free will is an illusion. Free will is
something we feel we experience when making decisions and choosing but
is really non existent, the actions we partake in are already set and
what we feel we decide is irrelevant to anything that actually
happens, Johns Locke's locked room scenario[3][3] is an example of
this. The man decides but ultimately his decision is inconsequential.
We appear to have decisions to make we can claim no responsibility
for. If an ethical choice is one that carries moral consequence it
will require moral deliberation and carry some form of moral
responsibility. Determinism removes this moral responsibility and so
removes ethical decisions. If a freedom which makes human free-will
relevant doesn't exist, making ethical choices is impossible.
Imcompatibilists realise that determinism creates a situation
where free will is obsolete and see an incompatibility between hard
determinism and moral responsibility. Because of this, they would
argue that universal causation is not necessarily relevant to human
actions. They do not deny any influence to the human mind that could
have an effect on the way in which one might act, but they claim that
there is still a large aspect of freedom of choice involved. John
Locke's scenario can argue as well for this idea as it can for the
concept of determinism which it was intended. In the situation the
outcome is set by means of the door being locked, but the human is
still able make the choice between option A or B whether he is able to
act on it or not.
The arguments Libertarianists give for the existence of human free
will are largely based on the defined different between ones
personality/psychological self and ones moral self. The former, being
developed largely as the result of personal experiences and a product
of a social environment, limits the choices you have by defining the
way your mind works, but it only works to make some choices more
likely than others and is not in anyway thought to restrict freedom.
The latter however, provides a mechanism of altering the way someone
can react to a situation even if their psychological condition made a
specific reaction inevitable, and could lead to a decision completely
against self interest and against all the odds. Libertarianism
provides a very definite conclusion to the ideas raised by the
question. The compromises to freedom, suggested in a deterministic
point of view, by means of everything being predestined, according to
libertarianism are actually irrelevant to human free will. No matter
how much the events around us may be pre determined the human mind
still has the capability of acting in a completely unpredictable
manner without any specific cause being suggested for actions.
Soft determinism is the third deterministic standpoint and one where
determinism and free will are completely compatible. The soft
deterministic concept relies on realising the difference between
Fatalism: Everything is set and we are completely powerless to change
the course of events, because they are forced upon us, And
Determinism: The idea that everything is caused and that once the
cause has occurred the action is destined to happen (theory of
universal causation). Soft determinists argue that, though
incompatible with fatalism, free will is completely compatible with
determinism, therefore the decisions we are free and able to make in
our own minds count as the causes by which everything is made to
occur. All the desires and emotions we experience, are causes of other
actions even though it could be argued that they are based largely on
upbringing and experience and can be themselves described as caused.
The soft determinist argument says little for the question of moral
responsibility because though they have managed to defend free will,
they have provided no argument against the view that the human mind
and so its desires and emotions are as a consequence of upbringing and
experience. Overall it says very little different to the determinist
argument and the free will it argues for in the context it argues for
it seems morally inconsequential. As Schopenhauer says, "A man can
surely do what he wills to do but he cannot determine what he wills."
If one cannot be anymore than the product of your environment then you
are only free to act within the reason of your own mind which has
developed beyond your intention. Even so are we in control of our own
minds, it is as yet impossible to prove whether we decide consciously
or whether our subconscious plays a large role in decision
making[4][4]. To what extent we are being coerced by our own sub
conscious is unknown. In a situation like this the responsibility for
what was apparently consciously taken ethical action would be left
with the physical and conscious self to deal with, whereas the action
was taken by the subconscious, as a natural reaction or other
phenomena. Responsibility is handed to an individual who readily
accepts it as he saw and experienced himself act, though it was by no
means what we would reasonably call intentional. Surely we can't be
free until we can in someway mould our own mind and morals think and
act in the way that we would prefer. In this situation we are free in
the capacity that we could make our own ethical decisions, but I can't
see it as being completely free. The mind with which we make our
decisions has in been influenced by a whole range of external factors.
These must reduce our moral responsibility and hence be restricting of
true freedom.
In both hard determinism and the concept of sub conscious decision
making, we see free will become little more than an illusion to our
conscious mind. As far as we are aware we are acting on and making our
own decisions. In reality we are unable to control them, but we are
completely conscious of them. If we are experiencing these ethical
decisions and as far as we are aware, making them through choice, then
we are accepting the moral responsibility for them and seeing that it
is us that is to blame for them. If we are capable of justifying them
to ourselves and making them seem reasonable in our own mind, then
surely we can accept the responsibility others place upon us. Peter
Geach summed up a similar concept by commenting that, "If my "mortal
mind" thinks I am miserable then I am miserable, and it is not an
illusion that I am miserable. [5][5]" Whether the free will we feel
when we think and act is an illusion or not, if we feel it and justify
it to ourselves then what we feel should be considered as real as
anything else. We are capable of experiencing mentally the freedom to
make ethical decisions even if we are not actually capable of making
them and so it would seem that an individuals belief in their own free
will when acting is as good as them carrying the act out freely. They
do it expecting the responsibility.
Whatever freedom we are offered, be it internal or external, it
seems we can not be held responsible for actions that we did not
consciously, reasonably and intentionally decide to take, simply
because it wasn't taken without the influence or coercion of another
factor. "Real freedom," as mentioned in the question seems to suggest
the freedom to take these fully conscious, and reasoned ethical
decisions, (an ethical decision being that which requires the
consideration and deliberation to make the decision fully intention
and to pre-empt the acceptance of moral responsibility for the
action). If this is the case then the question uses simple tortology
to suggest that, what we say is the ability to make ethical decisions
(freedom), is needed to make ethical decisions, and without it we
can't.
_______________________
[6][1] J.L.Mackie Ethics Inventing Right and Wrong (Penguin 1977)
Page208
[7][2] The theory of universal causation.
[8][3] Locked room scenario- A sleeping man is placed in a room with a
locked door. When he wake he consciously decide to remain in the room
and make no attempt to leave, not knowing that The door is locked. It
is a decision made by him and he could have decided to try and leave.
In reality he has no choice, he only believes he has a choice because
he is ignorant to the truth-This scenario fails to cover the fact that
the mans decision to stay was merely convenient and if he had actually
decided to leave the chain of events, if only mentally, would have
been different. The hard determinist view point would surely be that
his decision to stay in the room would be pre determined by previous
events and the fact that the door was locked would be irrelevant.
[9][4] Theories based on Freudian ideas suggest that "behaviour is
wholly determined by the unconscious parts of our minds". The
conscious part of our mind has very little to do with the way we
operate and essentially we are not in control. This would be a strong
argument for determinism but there is little evidence to suggest it
should be the case and at present is obsolete. ((Quote from
J.L.Mackie Ethics inventing right and wrong, (Penguin 1977) Page224))
[10][5] Peter Geach Logic Matters (Oxford1972) Page305
References
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