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25. marraskuuta 2009 |
                      
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-Matias Kuokkanen - Salo Upper secondary school
2. On free will A human being tends to think itself in normal life as a free being with its own will and authority of its actions. Some people, however, question this view and think that human being has no free will in its absolute sense, and that the choices we make are always determined beforehand (or by the time the option of choice occurs to us) by some other level. This point of view is called determinism, and it sees the world as an entity where all the particles are bound to be that way and the actions these particles and substances do are bound to happen, and no one or nothing can change the way they are or will be. Determinism faces problems when we ask ”who or what has adjusted the world?” or ”why, of all possible variations, is the world just like this one we are living in?”. In some occasions these questions are answered with some higher level, e.g. God. Since we would face much trouble asking further questions about this higher level, and the answers would rely on certain premises we could not prove absolutely true, we should observe the question of free will from the opposite side. Let us assume a situation where a man is at the first date with a woman he fancies. They are sitting next to each other in a café and the woman knows about the man’s feelings and enjoys the situation as long as his behaviour remains decent. However, when the man grabs her hand, she has to make a choice. She sees two options: to keep her hand in the man’s hand or to pull it away. Both of these actions have far-reaching consequences, she thinks, and can’t decide which one would be better, so she finds yet another option, which is to leave her hand at the man’s hand but ignore the whole thing. Now let as assume again that this was throughly her own decision and no other level has no part in it. She could have pulled her hand off or leave it as it was and smile or signalize in some other way that she likes the gesture, but she decided to ignore the gesture by her own free will. This action restricts her absolute freedom in this world making her hand an object, an unwilling particle. She exists in lower level, would Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher of the 20th century, say. Sartre believes that an individual is completely free to make its own decisions and nothing limits its liberty. This is quite the opposite than the deterministic point of view we viewed earlier. While in determined world one could either adopt a Stoan state of mind and take a cool and apathic attitude towards phenomena of his life or sink into desperation caused by his realization of his powerlessness and prescribed faith, in Sartre’s world one is free to make one’s own decisions and act in the way one wants to without any limitations apart from the logical and biological limits. This causes, according to Sartre, a deep feel of anxiety, because one is also responsible of everything due to his unlimited opportunity to do or not to do things, such as preventing a plane crash. This leads us to the questions of ethic. Let us still observe Sartre’s world for a while. To me there is only one subject, mysef. All the other people view the world the same way, i.e. being the only subject, while other people are objects which they are trying to get in their power. If one is capable of preventing a plane crash with many victims but still doesn’t do so, it might be obvious to say that he or she didn’t know such thing was going to take a place (obviously we are assuming the plane crash as a thing which should be prevented if possible). But even if one did and didn’t still prevent it, who is to blame him? I see two possible answers: his own conscience or some abstract higher power. The second option is, in Sartre’s world, possible only if the higher power doesn’t affect the world in any way, and if it doesn’t affect the world, it doesn’t occur to our free individual, who is to him-/herself the only subject in the world he or she lives in. Other people can’t blame him or her as they were presumably capable to prevent it, too. This would imply that Sartre’s view of ethics was highly personal depending on the individual. In Sartre’s world it would be impossible for some determined phenomenon to occur. But in a determined world where everything is prescribed, including one’s thoughts and options no matter how free one feels itself while making the choice, in the fourth dimension the world could be viewed as an entity with a possible beginning and ending including all the phenomena and all the beings ever existed in it. An example of such world is Tralfamadore, a planet in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Slaughterhouse-Five”. In Tralfamadore the inhabitants are aware of all the things of future, past and present simultaneously and have adopted the indifferent attitude towards phenomena. They do not feel free when making decisions since they already know all the consequences and the fact they cannot prevent them in any way. They are aware of the accidental destruction of their planet, too. They are not unhappy or happy but have reached a complete apathy, the utmost indifferent state of mind. The claim in the quote from Thomas Nagel’s article “What does it all mean?” strongly questions the laws of moral. If all the actions we do are prescribed, how is it possible for one to live absolutely right in terms of ethics, if these prescribed actions are in disagreement with the laws of ethics we assume are worth obeying? The laws of moral seem irrelevant if this is the fact. And if this fact occurs to us, they seem irrelevant to us, too. We would still have a sense of good and bad but at the same time we know we are not free to choose the option with good consequences. Perhaps this sense of good and bad depends on person. Perhaps this higher level, the Prescriber, has prescribed the actions in a way it sees would be the best. Or perhaps there is no good or bad, or no creature is to judge them, and not a single action has the label “good” or “bad” in it. Were the things like this, the whole concept of morality is irrelevant. I would still like to believe that there are both good and bad at least in the individual level. This seems close to Sartre’s world, too. Even if there didn’t exist universal laws of moral (prescriptionism), individuals could still understand the concept of good and bad by intuition. This implies to the intuitionism of G.E. Moore, a British philosopher of the 20th century. He claims that the laws of moral could be understood intuitionally, but nothing valid can be said about them (according to Ludvig Wittgenstein, the laws of moral are outside of the world of facts, of which can be said something valid). This view, however, allows as many views of moral to emerge as there are people in the world, and the views may vary dramatically. Some sorts of childlike faith to the natural will of man to do right is associated with Moore’s view.
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Tätä sivustoa on viimeksi päivitetty 25. marraskuuta 2009
