Without freedom it is impossible to make moral choice’...

Kant, a soft determinist, said that in order to make a moral decision we must have freedom. Kant believed that the ability to make moral decisions lay within the existence of freedom; stating that if we are not free to make our own decisions those decisions could not be moral as we were never free to make that decision in the first place. Kant thought that a person could be blamed for an action if they could have acted differently; for example if a person’s family is held at gunpoint and they are forced to open a safe they cannot be blamed as they did not have a choice. If we are to have free will we must have the ability to make a decision that is unhindered; Kant believed that we must have free will if we are to be help morally†¦show more content†¦Ted Honderich was another hard determinist who approached the idea of free will using the physics as his base; using the Aristotelian idea that nothing occurs without a cause. Honderich believed that events within the uni verse are determined and humans act in response to those events and are therefore not responsible for their actions. Using this belief one would argue that moral decisions cannot be made as there is no freedom to do so, everything is already determined beforehand. Saint Augustine was a religious determinist who believed that humanity required God’s help to do good; this is granted by God to humans, therefore God determines who will be saved and who will not. This is known as predestination; there irrelevance of our actions whether moral or immoral as God has already chosen those who shall be saved. John Calvin argued that people have no free will in regard to moral decision making; stating that God makes his choice about who to save, therefore does not look at a person and recognise them as good. Calvin stated that people only do good because God made them that way and placed them in an environment that would only make them do good. Logically Calvin concluded that if we have no control over our actions due to being made to act in a certain way, we cannot be considered responsible for them, thus we cannot make a moral decision as theShow MoreRelatedThe Inherent Rights of Human Beings Essay1123 Words   |  5 Pageswith an attempt to cre ate a working definition of a rights, and will then proceed to examine the essence of humanity and the roots of what is a right, to see if it is possible to have a right simply by being human. Questions concerning society, freedom and morality will all be seen to arise, and will be dealt with accordingly. A most important attempt at defining rights is Richard Dworkins metaphor of Rights as Trumps. This is essentially comparing a rights to a trump in a card game, oneRead MoreThe Authoritative Allocation Of Values940 Words   |  4 Pagesand protect us from doing harmful things to ourselves and individual people. 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