Sunday, February 5, 2012

Freedom and Moral Responsibility

There's an online set of "philosophy experiments." One of them has to do with the relationship between free will and moral responsibility, an issue we've been discussing in my Metaphysics and Epistemology class. You can check it out here.

(Thanks to the blog Flickers of Freedom for posting on this.)

1 comment:

Audrey Wenger said...

The blog on determinism vs. moral responsibility is a very interesting one. When I answered the questions on the link, it showed that I contradicted myself. Although I see where my contradictions are, and understand why they are contradictions, I will still stick with my original point. I believe that our “free will and/or moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism.” I stand with this statement because although Huntington killed someone without changing his mind and would have killed him even if he did because someone put a chip in his head, Huntington is still responsible. He is responsible because he didn’t decide to change his mind. If Huntington deviated from his original plan, then the chip would have been activated and he would no longer be responsible, because he would have no long had control over his actions when the chip was activated. Although I think the theories they describe are good, I feel that the theories force a person to be contradicted. Huntington had a choice. If he would have changed his mind and didn’t want to kill that person, he would have been forced to then, but he still had a choice for a moment and the choice he made in the moment changed who was responsible for the murder, that moment changed whether the murder would be of free will or forced manipulation. Therefore free will does hold has moral responsible for our actions.