Pros And Cons Of Indeterminism

Indeterminism which is the philosophical view opposing determinism. Many versions of indeterminism views were proposed by various philosophers, but those versions, which intended to save “Free will”, did not actually succeed for reasons that are to be presented.

The first version of indeterminism is the “non-causal indeterminism” which simply states that choice is not determined by prior reason-states, as reason-states are themselves “non-causal” (Ginet 1990). This argument raises a lot of problems, as it directly opposes the principle that any event has a prior cause. This idea of that some events are non-causal seems to be vain, because it does not work in a universe that is governed by deterministic physical laws, at least at the macro-scale

It basically argue that free-will is compatible with determinism. But it seems far-fetched at first to explain how free-will could be possible when we could not have done otherwise, or what is the meaning of free-will is in this case.

Most if not all indeterminist, while trying to prove the existence of “Free-Will”, have used the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP) which was proposed by Harry Frankfurt which states “A person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise”(David,1997). Frankfurt proposed what he called “Frankfurt’s Demon” which is a sophisticated thought experiment to disprove the PAP. The scenario as stated by (Frankfurt, 1969) proceed as follows: “Jones who has planned to shoot Smith, Black has heard about Jones’ plan to shoot Smith, Black also wants Jones to shoot Smith, so Black does some configurations so that if Jones showed any sign that he would not shoot Smith, a sign which Black could detect, then Black would manipulate Jones in a certain way to shoot Smith. On the planned day Jones go and shoot Smith for his own reasons, so at the end Black did not intervene”. So this seemingly sophisticated scenario is an example for an alternate possibility where jones would shoot smith in both cases so things could not have shouted Smith, yet he did with his own “free-will”. Although the validity of Frankfurt’s argument is so controversial among philosophers, yet it succeeded in guiding us that the compatibilist’ “free-will” with small “f” is not the “Free-will” that indeterminist are searching