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David Chen

Instructor Lyle Crawford

Philosophy 100

Words: 1404

4th April 2013

A Brief Introduction of Libertarianism and Its Dilemma

Do all of our actions have a cause, and are we merely a functioning object following determinism? Or do we control our own behaviours, so we have free will? This long time argument has been extended into two opponent theories: Libertarianism and Hard Determinism. Both of these theories, who are fans of incompatibilism, indicate determinism and free will cannot exist at the same time. One the contrary, the compatibilist theory, Soft Determinism, asserts that determinism and free will can be consistent. As believers and defenders of free will, even though libertarians seem to have strong appeals with our common sense, many of them have a problem defining what freedom is. Some libertarians try to come up with a major argument, agent causation, to reject Determinism. But the argument faces its own dilemma. Since Libertarianism has many problems which do not seem to have any solution, I prefer to choose the position of Hard Determinism in this paper.

The first appeal of Libertarianism, which aims to convince people to believe in free will, claims that people are so particular that they are detached from other things. No laws can control people’s behaviours, and therefore “they are free”. Regardless humans have souls or not, we are still the controller of our own behaviours (Conee and Sider, 2005, p.119). The ideology of Libertarianism is very convincing to most people, because that is how we are taught since we were born; how we think before and after we make choices; and why we punish criminals and award winners. We deeply believe the ideology of having free will and therefore should be responsible for our behaviours.

The second appeal of Libertarianism targets to the people who

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