Essay about determinism and moral responsibility - 1317 Words.
While Hume is largely remembered as being part of the empiricist movement that comprised of John Locke and George Berkeley, which largely focussed on the belief that knowledge came from our sensory experiences; this essay will focus on Hume’s work regarding the concept of free will and moral responsibility.
Soft determinism contrasts with both hard determinism and with what is sometimes called metaphysical libertarianism. Hard determinism asserts that determinism is true and denies that we have free will. Metaphysical libertarianism (not to be confused with the political doctrine of libertarianism) says that determinism is false since when we act freely some part of the process leading up to the.
Saul Smilansky's Free Will Vs. Determinism. In the free will vs. determinism debate, hard determinism seems to be a dominant belief. Hard determinism is the belief that free will and determinism are incompatible ideas, and that it is not possible to truly believe in both without being logically inconsistent.
Frankfurt's examples are significant because they suggest an alternative way to defend the compatibility of moral responsibility and determinism, in particular by rejecting the first premise of the argument. According to this view, responsibility is compatible with determinism because responsibility does not require the freedom to do otherwise.
Difficulty of moral responsibility, the problem of reconciling the fact that people are morally responsible for them with the obvious fact that individuals do not have free will since their actions are causally determined. It is an ancient and enduring philosophical puzzle.
Pereboom and morally responsibility: Claiming that freewill and determinism cannot xoexisit. The problem about moral responsibility arises from a conflict between two powerful consdiderations. On the one hand, we human beings feel that we are the source of our actions in a particularly weighty sense.
Determinists believe that outcomes occur due to fate. This makes it difficult to assign the moral responsibility on persons. This topic is interesting because there is difficulty reconciling determinism and freewill. One may think that where determinism exists there is no freewill and vice versa.