"Can a man freely control his own actions?" she asked.'”"Please think about it. Is it because of your innate qualities, the family environment you were born in and the social environment you grew up in? Or is it because of your own efforts or your will? Or is it the result of all these factors?
You might say, of course, it's the result of these factors working together.
However, those philosophers who claim that everything is determined by the law of causality will tell you that your will has no effect on these factors. Human behavior was also governed by the law of causality, and there was no freedom to speak of. There were two factors that controlled a person's behavior. One was the person's own desire, and the other was the external environment. The change of desire, the change of the external environment, and the process of the external environment stimulating people's desires and causing people to react strictly followed the law of causality. If we can find out all these complicated causality, we can calculate everyone's past, present, and future actions. Humans could never control their own actions, let alone control their own destiny. Everything you have done and will do has long been determined by your body structure and the environment in which you were born. It is the product of the interaction of these two factors that you cannot choose.
Perhaps you would refute them with an example: I was a farmer's child. I went to university and became an intellectual. The children in my village, although they grew up in a similar environment as me, are now farming or doing business. They are on a completely different path. This proved that personal choice and hard work played an important role.
But those philosophers will ask you: Why did you want to go to university and work hard for it? There must be a reason for this, because nothing in the world would happen without a reason. As long as one analyzed it carefully, one would be able to discover that there were certain factors that were different from the children in the same village, or in the structure of one's body, or in the environment where one grew up.
In fact, it was true that no two people had the same innate qualities or environment, so it was difficult to refute these philosophers. It was hard to argue seriously with these philosophers, but their logic was very simple: Everything that you have done is inevitable, so there is no other choice. After dinner, you want to read a novel and listen to music. After some hesitation, you choose music. They analyzed that it was inevitable for you to listen to music. You argue,"No, I wanted to read a novel just now. Listening to music is my free choice." They would say," But you finally chose to listen to music instead of reading a novel. There must be a reason, because nothing in the world happens without a reason. It's just that you don't know the reason, so you have the illusion of free choice." You get angry and say impatiently,'Alright, I'll tell you the reason. The reason is that I made a choice!' Of course, they would not admit that your choice was also the reason for your actions, because this was equivalent to admitting freedom of will. So they changed the way they guided you: Young man, don't get angry. Let's do an experiment to see if there's such a strange thing as free will. Try and see if you can raise your right arm purely by relying on your free will. After hearing this, if you can't get it up, it proves that you don't have free will. If you do, they'll tell you: You raised your right arm because we were arguing about freedom of will. You were provoked by my words and wanted to prove that you had freedom of will by raising your right arm. If it weren't for these causes and effects, you wouldn't be raising your right arm at this moment. Therefore, this just proves that your will is not free.”" What is free will?" she asked." It's meaningless to argue like this. In order for the discussion to make useful progress, it was necessary to clarify the concept of freedom of will and limit the scope of discussion. In fact, those philosophers who advocated freedom of will were willing to admit that human physical life was governed by the laws of nature to a certain extent. In this field, even if there was freedom of will, it was very small and unimportant. The question of freedom of will was of the utmost importance in the field of human spiritual life, especially in the field of moral life.
If there was no freedom of will, people could not freely choose and control their own actions, and morality would lose its basis. If murder, arson, theft, and so on were all inevitable reasons for the body or the environment, and the individual's will was completely powerless to do anything about it, you certainly had no reason to ask criminals to bear moral responsibility for their crimes.
In order to prove that humans had freedom of will, some philosophers emphasized that reason was the essence of human beings. Humans could distinguish good from evil by reason and make choices accordingly. Other philosophers declared that there was no fixed essence of man, so he had nothing to rely on at all times, but he was also free to decide his own actions. No matter what, they believed that people had the freedom to choose. No matter how forced the situation was, one always had the freedom to say no. With a knife at your neck, you don't have to surrender, because you can choose to die, and this proves that you are free. Of course, those who did not admit that there was freedom of will would definitely say," There is a reason why you chose to die. From your past experiences, I can analyze the necessity of this choice. It can be seen that it is not a free choice. It seemed that he could not convince anyone in the end, and it was very likely that these two factions were discussing different things.”
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