Good What Is Free Will, Anyway? Essay Example

Two stories from the crime pages in Florida make the mind roil in terms of their ethical consideration, but they also raise some interesting questions about the role that fate and free will combine to play in our lives. The first is the story of Casey Anthony. Even though a jury acquitted her of the charge of murder, the preponderance of the evidence, at least to many, indicated that she more than likely used duct tape to suffocate her daughter and then dumped the body somewhere where it took a repairman weeks to find it. The second is the story of George Zimmerman. Acting on his own initiative as a particularly eager neighborhood watch officer, he confronted a young man who was walking through a local housing area. Moments later, the young man was dead, shot with a gun that Zimmerman had been carrying after the two had started to fight. In both cases, one could ask whether Casey’s young daughter, Caylee, and the young man, Trayvon Martin, had what was coming to them set in motion by determinism, or whether they had control of their fates. An analysis of hard determinism, soft determinism and libertarianism with regard to these two cases clearly shows that, in the final analysis, soft determinism provides the best explanation for how much of our lives we control and are accountable for, and how much would have happened to us no matter what we did.
Hard determinism indicates that the things that are happening to us were set in motion by others and that there is no way that we could avoid them. There are many who object to this line of thought because it appears to absolve people of any sort of responsibility for the things that happen to them. It also seems to take a lot of agency out of life, because if there is no way to avoid the events that are coming our way, that could actually become depressing over time, because no matter what we do, the same events are going to befall us. However, one of the two cases from the introduction appears to support hard determinism: the death of young Caylee Anthony. Whether it was her mother who killed her or some unknown party, at some point there was a time when her death became inevitable. For the case of the hypothetical, if we assume that Caylee’s mother killed her, there is no way that Caylee could have controlled that. As a young child, she does not have the power to escape what is coming. Hard determinists would then move backward up the chain of causality, suggesting that life as a young single mother would make it so hard on Casey that she was likely to bring harm to her child in some way. Going further back up the chain, hard determinists might argue that elements in Casey’s upbringing, such as her relationship with her father (a relationship that came under some question during Casey’s trial, to the point where he separated from his wife for a time) caused her to get into the sort of sexual relationship that would lead to single motherhood. In the case of Trayvon Martin’s death, where two people come together and end up fighting, the hard determinist case is harder to make, because there are so many ways that both of the agents could have made decisions differently. If Trayvon had not gotten high before he went to the convenience store to get snacks, he would not have been where George Zimmerman could have seen him. If Zimmerman had stayed in his car, like the 911 dispatcher told him, he would not have gotten into the physical altercation with Martin. With all of these elements of individual choice, hard determinism is a difficult case to make.
The libertarian case, of course, is even harder to make. This is, in a way, the sexiest of the three choices, because the assumption is that everyone has complete control (and, as an extension, complete moral responsibility) over the choices that they make in life. I refer to this as the “sexiest” because it seems to leave the most in the control over the individual. This also dovetails nicely with the Puritan work ethic that has informed so much of what has become the American sense of right and wrong. If a crew of Pilgrims can haul themselves off a ship and live through a god-awful winter and a few of them can make it to the next harvest, that means that the rest of us can live through just as much privation (whether of a material or psychological sort) and then emerge just as pristine and victorious as those original founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Consider the case of young Caylee Anthony. In what way could you say that she had any control of her outcome? Even if you want to say that she is an exception because she is a child, if it is true that George Anthony abused his daughter, is she truly an independent agent? Or would she have gone through such psychological trauma that she would not be able to make decisions with the same freedom as someone else? What about Trayvon Martin? If he had been white, or if he had been a woman, would George Zimmerman have made the same conclusions? It appears to have been true that Martin at least vigorously engaged in the fight with Zimmerman, at one point slamming Zimmerman’s head on the pavement before he was shot. However, if he thought that Zimmerman were acting in a racist way, then that would lend an additional factor to the situation. Would that excuse the fight? How about if we add that Martin was a teenager while Zimmerman was an older adult? Who should have shown the better judgment? In a libertarian assessment of the situation, both of the pugilists would equally be at fault, but given the metrics of the situation, it is fairly clear that a purely 50-50 division of blame is inappropriate as well.
This leaves us, of course, with the soft deterministic alternative. In this, there is a compromise between the insistence that every event has a causality that proscribes the possibility of choice and the notion that the only factor in a decision is the will of the individual. So let’s go back to the instance of Casey Anthony. If she had grown up in a fully functional family, it is likely that the pairing of her accusations of her father of abusing her and her father moving out of his home for a time would not have happened. In a fully functional family, she might still have become an unwed mother, but she might have felt like she had the support system to raise Caylee without taking such drastic steps. So there were some factors that pushed her in this direction, but she still had the moral responsibility for the choice that she made – and, most importantly, she had the free will to choose not to do it. If we look at the collision of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, there were two people in the situation who both had the choice to render a different outcome. Martin could have chosen not go get high and then amble to the convenience store. Marijuana use does influence decision making, and so when he came back through and saw Zimmerman, it is possible that he acted differently than he would have if he had not been using. Zimmerman had gone through some robberies in the past, which was part of his motivation to serve on the neighborhood watch, and those experiences likely influenced his behavior when he saw Martin. However, Martin still had the choice as to whether to enter an altercation or not, and Zimmerman had the choice as to whether to stay in his car (as, once again, the police dispatcher told him to do) or to engage Martin by himself. Zimmerman made his choice, and Martin made his choice, and Martin ended up dead. Both people in the situation had choices to make, but it is also true that there were factors influencing their behavior in this situation. This is why soft determinism is the best choice when ascertaining the blend of free will and destiny that drives our futures.