Free Will, the Leopold-Loeb Case
This is an excerpt from the paper...
I. Assuming (for the moment) that we are capable of changing our minds on the free will question, let us examine what, if any, effect this would have on our daily lives. I will address the possibility of accepting hard determinism instead of soft determinism in this essay: I will not discuss the acceptance of indeterminism because it suffers such serious structural flaws in its thesis that human actions are uncaused that it is not really worth the effort. First I feel I must explicitly state, although it seems obvious, that soft determinism is the generally accepted position in this culture. We act as if we had the freedom to choose our thoughts and actions, and we continue to want to reward and punish ourselves and others in accordance with the latter belief. However, we also clearly do not hold ourselves responsible for acts which we did not intend or understand the consequences of, or which we felt forced to do. These are the arguments of ignorance and compulsion which are accepted by most of us to excuse us from moral accountability.Having briefly spelled this out, I will examine what might happen if we were to somehow collectively decide (i.e. through a scientific breakthrough or mass religious conversion) that we have been mistaken and that hard determinism, not soft, was correct. If we believed that all of our behavior is not only caused (as soft determinists accept too), but also is not free - that is, we literally have no choice but to act as we do - then all
. . .
f freely changing our minds or of controlling our desires even when they contradict rationality, thus making a preliminary case for the validity of hard determinism. From this brief analysis, I must conclude that even if we could somehow change our minds about the free will question, it would not actually affect our daily lives because we would not be able to change our behavior tho suit our new ideology unless we were also conditioned genetically, socially, and psychologically to do so, which would take years, if not generations.
II. To speak of strong-willed vs. weak-willed people is clearly a soft determinist concept, and a somewhat irrelevant one as well. I call it irrelevant because even if you were to plead that you were weak-willed and could not resist an action, it would do you no good because, under a soft determinist doctrine of morality, you should have had a stronger will so you would still be punished for your allegedly irresistible action.
I believe it is more coherent to say that (contrary to Hobbes) there is no "will" per se, only different desires of varying strengths such that one acts in accordance with whichever desire is strongest at a given moment. Further, these desires and their relative strengths can
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
, Loeb Leopold, hard determinism, soft determinism, loeb leopold, minds free, determinism correct, life prison, change minds, hard determinism correct, minds free question, loeb leopold morally, sentenced life, soft determinist, change minds free, soft determinists, loeb leopold death,
Approximate Word count = 1479
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
