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Peter Van Inwagen On Free Will

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Free will allows freedom of choice. Free will is the ability to choose with intelligence and common sense. Our choices cannot be completely free from our knowledge, values, perceptions of everyday life and the things around us. Our choices are not free from the influence of our past thoughts and decisions. The freedom of free will is not discrediting influencing factors such as our own self-awareness, our ability to seek out knowledge and project the future, and our awareness of our own thinking. This is where our source of freedom comes from. It makes us as human beings aware of what we want. The proper understanding of free will is that our choices are not free from various influences, but we are free to make our own choices in the end. Peter van Inwagen argues that the very existence of moral responsibility entails the existence of free will. …show more content…

It appears to violate the law of causation: Every effect must have a cause; the same cause always produces the same effects. Free Will denies that it is a cause due to the effect of something else. Since a person 's choice is not an effect, we can assume that the law of causation is not relevant to free will. What is the relationship between the law of causation and free will? In a sense, causality is needed for free will to exist, because an essential part of free will is the idea that we cause our own actions. In order to answer this, we must define the difference between actions and choices. Actions are the effects of a cause known as free will. Free will causes our actions by the choices we make. We choose many things that influence our lives, such as beliefs, movements, the way we act and the things we do. Of course, there are also many things in our lives that we do involuntarily, such as having emotions and our bodily

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