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Free Will and Moral Responsibility
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Religious Studies AQA A Level. Complete Year 2 Ethics notes.
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Free will and moral responsibilityActing with free will requires a conscious human agent
- Machines or animals are not morally responsible.
- There are many ramifications of where responsibility lies.
o For example, if you had a heart attack whilst driving and killed someone, you are not
responsible, unless you had failed to take heart medication.
- Defining precise levels of responsibility can be problematic.
- Being able to distinguish right from wrong is also not so clear cut as we might think, because there
are at least four types of people who have not yet learned it:
o Babies and young children
o Those intellectually incapable of learning it
o Those who have permanently forgotten it
o Those under pressure of anger, anxiety, etc. who might temporarily forget it
Sources of a person’s moral awareness
Hume believed that we have a ‘moral sense’, a faculty of sympathy. Many believe this, that our
morality is in some way innate.
We can learn about right and wrong from our social context.
Religions present believers with moral principles and rules.
The extent of moral responsibility
o Hard Determinism
Epicurus said that although observation and science point to Determinism, personal and
moral experience point to free will.
Hard determinism assumes ‘universal causation’ and assumes that free will is simply an
illusion cause by brain processes.
Supported by Reductionism, it reduces our thoughts to electrical impulses in the brain.
The powerful ‘feeling’ that we are free is merely an illusion caused by our ignorance of the
totality of causes operating on us.
o Scientific Determinism
All the physical processes in the universe operate in a sequence of causes from the
Big Bang, approximately 13.8 billion years ago.
The causal sequence suggests that all physical events are determined by prior
causes.
The mind can be examined by the physical sciences, so is also determined and has
no free will.
An omniscient ‘Intelligence’ could compute all these forces and so prove the point.
Avoiding Scientific Determinism
If the laws of nature are probabilistic, or if the quantum world is
indeterminate.
If indeterminacy is located in the quantum states of the mind.
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