Free Will Debate

Do Human Beings Have Free Will?

The dispute between libertarianism and determinism is the dispute between whether humans have free will, or not. To get a better understanding of this debate, it is necessary to define both of the terms libertarianism and determinism. Libertarianism is the belief that humans have the ability to alter their actions in order to achieve a certain goal without the constraint of necessity or fate. Libertarians believe humans have free will. Hard determinism is the belief that all a persons actions are completely determined by external factors. Hard determinists do not believe in free will, so humans shouldn't be held ethically accountable for their actions, since they are wholly just a product of their environment. After considering the two sides of the free will debate, libertarianism seems to be the most plausible of the two explanations.

One of the reasons why libertarianism seems to be the most plausible is because it can explain more types of human behavior than hard determinism can. For example, you can’t predict with certainty what decisions every person is going to make all the time. You could do this if hard determinism was the case. This shows how people must have free will. You can’t predict with certainty what decisions every person is going to make all the time because the decisions people make are affected by internal forces too, not just external. Therefore, libertarianism has more explanatory breadth than hard determinism.

Hard determinism explains human behavior in greater detail than libertarianism does. For example, libertarianism states humans have free will, and that's how people make decisions. For example free will gives you options. Where the hard determinism explanation of how humans make decisions is much more scientific and can use numbers, which leads to it being more believable. Hard determinism, thinking that the entire universe is mechanical, would be to explain how if we know how particles interact, then we could predict what is going to happen in the future with certainty. For example this gives you just one outcome. This requires more details than just supporting the belief of free will, so hard determinism has more explanatory depth than libertarianism.

The simplicity of libertarianism helps it seem like the most plausible of the two. In libertarianism, it only makes the claim that humans have free will. Hard determinism makes the claim that all of our actions are caused by earlier psychological or physical events. So it claims more unknowns than libertarianism does. You can predict what decision someone is going to make and have a probability of potential outcomes, but you can never be absolutely certain of an outcome, because people possess free will. Where hard determinism claims our decisions are made by two factors, earlier psychological events, memories, or physical events. Libertarianism claims one element causes human actions where hard determinism claims more than one element causes human actions.

Normally people don’t think that everything is predictable, and that predicting the future with certainty is impossible. Also, people are held accountable for their actions in todays society. Hard determinism eliminates moral responsibility, which our current society believes in. For example, no one would go to jail if this is what we believed, since people couldn’t help their actions. Libertarianism states people control their actions, which is why we have jails. Therefore, there is more conservatism in liberalism than there is in hard determinism.

In conclusion, libertarianism is more plausible than its competitor, hard determinism. Although, hard determinism, or having an entirely mechanical universe, would be nice, it is not a plausible belief. Eliminating moral responsibility is a radical implication, also physics does not support that the universe is entirely mechanical.

1.Hard determinism and libertarianism are the most plausible explanations of human actions.

2.Libertarianism has more explanatory breadth, simplicity and conservatism, and hard determinism has more explanatory depth.

3.Therefore, libertarianism is the best explanation of human actions.