Asses the claim that humans are not free to make moral decisions

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Assess the claim that human beings are not really free to make moral choices

Whether or not humans are free to make moral decision or have ‘free will’ is one that has produced much controversy over the many years it has been debated. There are 3 main stances to this argument, those being ‘Hard’ Determinism, ‘Weak’ Determinism and Libertarianism, all of which will be discussed in the following essay. Strict determinists, such as Baron Holbach, perceive the idea of free will as an illusion due to the determined outcomes that could be predicted by the right knowledge of the causes that affect us however Libertarians such as Roderick Chisholm perceive our freedom as requiring a self, which intervenes in our decision-making. Many people like to think that humans do infact have free will, simply because of the implications that not having it will produce. For example, if it is clear that we are not free or able to make moral choices, immoral acts, such as rape murder etc. are able to go unpunished, which consequently would make the world in which we live an incredibly unsafe place. In my opinion I believe in the weak determinism theory that suggests some things of what we do is predetermined but we still do make choices. This is because a lot of what we do is determined on our up bringing our phenotype etc which produces a limited choice, but still a choice nonetheless.

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Hard Determinism is the belief that a determinate set of conditions can only produce one possible outcome given fixed laws of nature. It holds that every event, everything that happens or occurs, has a cause (universal causation). The strongest version of determinism is that very action we do is determined by our genetics and out preceding environmental states and laws of psychology.  One problem with this however is that fact that psychology hasn’t discovered many strict laws, it has made some ‘rules of thumb’ however that help us understand people and statistical laws, but no strict laws. For example we ...

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