Free Will and Determinism

One of the staple debates in modern Philosophy is 'Free Will' vs. 'Determinism'. An event is said to be the effect of 'free will' when it is set in motion by a deliberate decision that is itself not the effect of any prior cause. An event is said to be 'determined' when its proximate cause is itself the effect of some prior cause. Free will is thus to be distinguished from spontaneous randomness. Some familiar examples of prior determining causes are pain, divine pre-ordination, social conditions, and genetic predisposition. There have been a variety of positions staked out in this debate, from hard determinists who believe that no human conduct is free, to free will absolutists who maintain just the opposite, with admixture views in between, including some that hold that these are two sides of the same coin, and, hence, are both correct. A standard Determinist argument is that Free Will is an illusion, because the thought that seems to precede an action as its cause is actually a bystander merely recording what is transpiring independently of it. In turn, advocates of Free Will counter that Consciousness is the organic deferral of action, and, hence, the everpresent option of refraining from some action, so, every invocation of an objective influence on what is about to occur is a profound evasion of responsibility on the part of the conscious subject. Interestingly, Aristotle pays only passing attention to the issue, in his attempt to draw a line between voluntary and involuntary conduct, a criterion of primary relevance to the specific topic of Retributive Justice, with the central variable being the influence of knowledge on behavior. This comparatively modest Ancient treatment of the issue suggests that its significance might be less than eternal. For example, given that God is both omnipotent and Good, someone else must be responsible for the existence of Evil in the world. Hence, it must be humans who bring it about, and they can only do so if they possess 'Free Will'. So, absent the theological premises, there is no reason for a problem of such cosmic magnitude to even arise. Instead, as is more plainly the case, how much control someone has over what they are doing is a function of a variety of specific factors, especially their capabilities at that moment, and the immediate circumstances, with control being a matter of degree, not of some absolute condition.