Pros And Cons Of Libertarian Free Will

Are we free? On one hand most of us have the clear mindset that we are, we feel and act free, we feel like we make all sorts of decisions, good or bad that lead to both beliefs (that we are and that we’re not free) but it has yet to be proven that somebody can just decide to change his or her beliefs in any which way. But, consider knocking someone out, or, for another example, I donate wheat to a third world country on a whim, just because I feel like it. This view that humans are more than capable of making entirely free actions is known as libertarian free will, or in other words the belief that some human actions are freely chosen by the person. To be perfectly clear, libertarian free will is nothing like political libertarianism, however, people who accept libertarian free will could be anything from political libertarians to socialists, they just think that we can act freely. So we have figured out that our thoughts and actions are free, but most of us also believe that every effect had a cause and that everything that happens now in the present is the result of something that happened in the past. This is what we know as determinism. Hard determinism on the other hand says that we are determined and therefore we don’t have free will, nor are we morally responsible for our own actions. You can’t rationally hold the libertarian and hard determinist views together because traditionally libertarians have said actions that are free according to what’s known as the principle of alternate possibilities says an action is free only if the “agent” (the person performing the action) could have done otherwise. So truly free actions require and or need options. Hard determinism doesn’t allow options, it holds that every event is caused by a previous event, which means that an agent never could have done anything other than what they did, which means that they were and are never free. But let’s look at these two options more closely. Libertarianism says that my decision to donate wheat to the less fortunate in a third world country wasn’t caused by anything that happened before it. Instead it could be the factor of nonphysical objects specifically my thought that happened there and then. I decided to make the donation because I simply had a whim never having donated in the past or feeling remorse for anyone who I donated too, no matter how sadistic that sounds that’s what I would need to feel in order to be free according to the libertarians, end of story. But libertarianism doesn’t accept what we know about how the physical world works, it works with one thing causing another so libertarianism needs a way to keep track of their views. But many libertarians also argue that there is such a thing as this agent causation. …show more content…
This is where a being can start a whole chain of causes that wasn’t caused by anything else. So people freely do things because they decide to do things. With this, agents can change the chain of events in the universe, they can make stuff happen on their own. But many philosophers find this idea not realistic. Where would these decisions come from? To clarify this I would say that “free decisions” the ones that aren’t caused by anything, would just appear. Hard determinists are capable of explaining why we feel free by explaining the ignorance of our deterministic reasons we make our choices. The reason libertarianism is plausible is because people take moral responsibility seriously, especially for their actions. D’holbach says that none of our actions are actually free. That everything that is happening right now is because of an unbroken cycle of events. This means humans and our actions are just part of the physical world governed by our physical regulations. This is where the Belief- Desire- Psychology Model comes into play. This model explains that people understand other regular people in ways assuming that other peoples ways of behaving are the out comings of their thoughts (in their psyche.) The assumption is people have concepts like the person who thought of them. These beliefs can be built up into beliefs and desires. The beliefs and desires then make intentions which then