“Without real freedom there would be no ethical decisions to make,” Discuss.

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"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.
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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 ...

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