Assignment 3, Free Will

October 7^th, 2002

Assignment 3, Free Will

Do we all have in reality the free will to do what we want or is it just an illusion?

The concept of free will is easily understood as we all have a choice to choose if only those choices we make are voluntary rather than forced upon us by other factors.  Yet in the interest of justifying if free will exists there are discrepancies in ones having a belief or exclusion of a belief.  The problem in believing that we all have free will, we must first succumb to religious terms or to certain laws that applies to fulfill the concept of free will.  It is a give and take situation.  If you truly believe in free will that means there are no laws holding your actions back just because you have social obligation with in a community and no praising and no blaming as consequences for your actions.  Another problem is we believe in free will but we still want to have control which also reflects in having responsibility and morality within a social structure and if not we will have anarchy.

Living within a communal group already suggests that we will not have the right to exercise our actions openly.  Society is there to repress certain desires even if it is labeling you as a good person or a bad person.  A good person will do well with in a group and a bad person would be an outcast.  To have free will there would be no differentiations between the good and bad because those actions either good or bad should not be confining with borders.   If there is no difference between good or bad actions then the choices to choose are unlimited.

For example Saint Augustine’s concept of free will derived from his conversion from Manichaeism to Christianity.  In Manichaeism the belief was that the world is structured half good and half evil reflected the idea that there is no free will.  But on the other hand there is free will because a person can be good or evil and it is open to him or her.  Christianity on other hand refuted the idea that evil exist because it is the structure of the world.  Evil in Christianity is about the pleasure of the body.  Augustine claimed from his experience that we all have free will because there are conflicts within the soul to choose the actions to be carried out like a battle between doing evil and doing good.  His believing in the existence of soul draws to conclude his belief in Christianity.  And he believes that God contributed to doing good instead of evil.  If that is true then a Christian’s action would be choices among good deeds rather than bad.  This is already a conflict of free will because it is about moral obligation toward a religion on its social values. 

Another factor is that to have free will one thinks that he or she would have control.  There is in fact no control because free will cannot be thought in a logical manner.  If it is considered to be logical then any actions that a person will take would be a cause and effect.  Some may argue that one action that is taken may not have to do with the next action and the actions could be independent from one another.  The actions could be independent of each other because of time factor.  For example, a person wanting to go to work today would decide that they are not going to work tomorrow.  Those actions seemed independent just from the superficial facts.  But on the other hand what made those choices could be dependent on some experiences of outside influences and also memories. 

In Hans Sluga’s description of the concept of free will, he finds a distinction between the self and the world to be a separate entity.  He further states that it is about resistance and control.  But then if a person is holding back because he or she felt responsible to have a certain control over the self and the world that is already sets a limit of free will.  Even if a person may want to exert a control over the outside world and he or she is not able to do so because of the physical aspect of body then free will does not work in its full potential.  For example, a person’s will is to lift a 10-pound box and that person tries and failed because of his or her physical ability life the box.  Unless we all work within the guidelines that we know we have a limit and we work within the limit then we are able to see free will exist only under those circumstances. 
In other words free will exists because we all feel that we have the choices to choose, but it works only in a context of rules which everyone in a group must agreed to a set of conditions. With that in mind, it is not truly free will, but an illusion because we still want to take responsibility and we want to have control over the self and the world. The problem is that we cannot have both free will and also have control.