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Thomas Nagel Free Will Summary

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“Free Will” by Thomas Nagel’s talks about how free will is revealed using a cake and peach example. You are standing in the cafeteria line and are determining whether to choose a piece of chocolate cake or the healthier choice, a peach. Additionally, Nagel states that certain things in the world are essentially determined beforehand, an example he uses in the text, the sun rising every morning at a certain hour. There isn’t the possible chance as to whether the sun will rise tomorrow or not, but the decision regarding the chocolate cake or the peach wasn’t inevitable or established in advance. By choosing the cake, you simply made the decision for it because you were just craving the cake more than you were for the peach and “there were no …show more content…

By choosing to act a certain way instead of another, you had the freedom to act any way you wanted to and differently. Choices that you make are not predetermined in the future which means that determinism itself has to be wrong. This means that we have the absolute free will over every single choice made in our daily lives. If someone does something wrong, why should they be punished if they were just simply going by their predetermined script? If that were true, they’d have no say over their wrong choices, just like the rain has no say for falling from the sky. The reward process is the same thing. If someone is exceptionally very smart, why should that person be rewarded and praised if their actions were already predetermined this whole time? It should not, which makes everything insignificant and meaningless in life. With a predetermined script already in hand, everyone would see that there would be no motive to work or test something new if everyone were continuously on a path leading to one ending in life with no other opportunities. This is why I am in agreeance with Nagel’s understanding on free will standing true rather than determinism. Determinism has some good points, but the simple possibility that every action and situation that I haven’t yet confronted are predestined and already determined is just so strange and weird to me and it doesn’t allow me to enjoy life and the unknown mysteries that come along with

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