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Argumentative Essay On Free Will

1146 Words5 Pages

Human’s free will is one of the most debatable problems in the field of both philosophy and ethics. Does everybody has a control on his choices and actions or it all was determined in advance. According to the Scottish philosopher David Hume on the problem of free will: “the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science” [1]. Free will is defined as the ability of humans to make decisions that are not determined by divine intervention or caused by a preceding cause [2]. It is agreed by philosophers who dealt with the problem of free will that a human is not free to make a choice unless he could have done otherwise, in what is known as the principle of alternative possibilities [3]. The free will problem arose in the Greek mythology in many instances such as the tragedy of Oedipus in its different versions as Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. …show more content…

The first one is the libertarian free will, which believes that humans have free will and their choices are not predetermined [4].The second one is the hard determinism, which believes that human free will is an illusion and every event in the universe in predetermined by laws of nature. In other words, nothing other than what happened could have occurred [5]. The last perspective is the compatibilist, and that standpoint combines both free will and some type of determinism by which the existence of an omniscient god could be plausible. This perspective is held by many theists as it supports the principle of reward and punishment which is basic in religions. The main aim of this paper to discuss whether we have free will and consequently responsible for our choices or

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