Instinct Or Free Will

7 Pages 1701 Words

Free Will—A Matter of Perspective
I want to argue that there is indeed free will. In order to defend the position that free will means that human beings can cause some of what they do on their own; in other words, what they do is not explainable solely by references to factors that have influenced them. My thesis then, is that human beings are able to cause their own actions and they are therefore responsible for what they do. In a basic sense we are all original actors capable of making moves in the world. We are initiators of our own behavior.
The first matter to be noted is that this view is in no way in contradiction to science. Free will is a natural phenomenon, something that emerged in nature with the emergence of human beings, with their kinds of minds, minds that can think and be aware of their own thinking.
Nature is complicated. It includes many different sorts of things and one of these is human beings. Such beings exhibit one unique yet natural attribute that others things apparently do not—that is free will.
A reason why some think that free will is not possible is because many believe that the only way we know about nature is from observations that we collect. Since observation can not give us a justification of free will, it is easy to think that there isn’t any such thing. Free will may not be something that we can see directly, but what best explains what we do see in human life. This may include, for example, the mistakes that human beings make in contrast to the few mistakes that other animals make. We also notice that human beings do all kinds of odd things that cannot be accounted for. We can examine a person’s background and find that some people with bad childhoods turn out to be decent, and vise versa. Free will comes as a very helpful explanation of this.
Another matter that might count against free will is that the beings in nature do not exhibit free will. Dogs, lizards, fish...