Free will and its effect on the idea of moral responsibility creates many differing ideas. Roderick M. Chisholm, a libertarian, believes that determinism is in direct conflict with moral responsibility. David Hume, a compatibilist, believes otherwise. He believes that moral responsibility does fit into the idea of determinism. Despite these conflicting views, one side has much stronger evidence than the other, which leads us to believe that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism. Determinism is the idea that everything, and everyone, is predetermined by prior events or the laws of nature, including our actions. To put it simply, every cause has an event. Our ideas, which themselves are a type of event, could then be seen as having …show more content…
Chisholm has one of the possible answers to this question. Chisholm is a libertarian, this means that he believes that we do have free will and our actions are not predetermined. This goes along with the idea that free will and determinism are incompatible. The strongest piece of evidence that libertarians often use is just our everyday experiences. It is our everyday experience that we are able to make genuine choices, we feel free. Now comes the question of moral responsibility. Chisholm uses the example of a man shooting someone. If this man were to be responsible for what happens, then the shooting has to be entirely up to the man himself and not fate or predetermined actions. It was his choice, his responsibility, whether or not he would shoot something. “But if the act which he did perform was an act that was also in his power not to perform, then it could not have been caused or determined by any event that was not itself within his power either to bring about or not to bring about.” (pg. 418) Therefore, if the action was caused by the man's beliefs and desires, he is not responsible unless he is responsible for holding those beliefs and …show more content…
Determinism is against the idea that we are directly in charge of our ideas and actions, so it is also against moral responsibility. Although this argument is quite damning, there are still the ideas and objections of David Hume. David Hume is a compatibilist, otherwise known as a soft determinist. Compatibilists believe, like hard determinists, that many things are influenced by the universe and that the past does affect the future. “It is universally allowed that nothing exists without a cause of its existence, and that chance, when strictly examined, is a mere negative word and means not any real power which has anywhere a being in nature.” (pg. 436) However, they also support aspects of libertarianism, such as the freedom of some human actions. So where might a compatibilist stand on the idea of moral responsibility? A compatibilist would disagree with both the ideas of libertarians and determinists that moral responsibility, and thus free will, are incompatible with determinism. Compatibilists believe that everything is still determined, but we can call an action free when the determination comes from within