Free Will Theory

In this essay I will discuss about the problem of free will, which is a mystery about a human being able to decide what they want to do. The problem of free will be examined from a case of a perfect crime that involved two teenage boys Richard Leopold and Nathan Loeb who belonged to wealthy families and were exceptionally intelligent students at their university. They planned to commit a perfect crime by kidnapping and committing a murder of a 14-year-old Robert Franks without any motive behind the killing. During their act of killing Franks they drove him few blocks towards his house and than grabbed him and smashed him four times in his skull with a chisel before he died. Later they tried to hide the dead body by stuffing him in a drainpipe
The theory of soft determinism discusses that the human behaviour and its actions are determined by their causal events. Here determinism means that every event has a cause and making determinism soft requires that we can control the cause of our actions to make them free actions that are caused in the right sort of way. According to soft determinism free will is a situation in which it can be said that a person acted freely, they did not act due to any compulsion or external pressure to do something. A person acted as a free agent even though their actions seemed to be caused as much as those that are not free. The theory of free will can easily apply to the crime of Leopold and Loeb their actions didn’t seem to be convinced by an external force as their lawyer stated at the trial. Rather their actions were free, as they wanted to set an example by committing a perfect crime that could set up people talking about it. Moreover they had committed several burglaries together that could provide the evidence that they acted freely and had a mutual interest in committing a
I will emphasis on the objection of hypnosis where the mind of a person is manipulated to commit an act. For instance when a person is hypnotized to kill someone in the process the murder that the hypnotized person commits would be caused by his/her beliefs and desires. Here the definition of soft determinism appears to be incorrect. There seem to be no free will in the act of murder as an external force of hypnotism and not by person’s beliefs and desires motivated it. They had to act under a pressure and compulsion of hypnotism. In the case of hypnotism the beliefs and desires were committed against the person’s own will. The evidence of actions being caused by hypnotism makes the definition of free actions