Schopenhauer On Free Will

I believe most people have some sort of consensus to what free will is; the ability to make choices. Free will cannot be simplified down to a single absolute definition because in this age, we don’t entirely know why or how we make these decisions. To my beliefs, free will is the sense where individuals can consciously think for themselves on what they want to do, whether that is getting the fish instead of chicken for dinner or deciding to run for president. Even though we have the option to always make the right decision, we often make the wrong one. This agrees with the principle that we do not have free will, because if we did have the ability to make our own choices, we would always make the right one. However, we are still making the
With the ability to make our own choices, we must keep in mind that whatever choice we do make can have a bad or good effect on people. As human beings we control our fate, it is by our own conscious minds that allow us to decide what we do. Being a conscious living being, we are granted with the gift of being able to make our own decisions, without our future being fixed.
Schopenhauer rejects the notion of free will altogether. He explains in his argument that “a man can do multiple things, make multiple paths in his life, but do none of that and to go back to his wife.” There are numerous problems with Schopenhauer’s’ argument. One problem with Schopenhauer’s argument is that even though the man is not taking those other paths, he is still consciously making the decision to head back home with his wife based on his own free will. Even if there is something predetermining the man to head back home to his wife on that day, it does not mean he would head back home to his wife every day after work. Another problem made is that Schopenhauer is making a common fallacy, that being the hasty generalization fallacy. He generalizes in saying that the man will finish work and go straight home to their lives, but that
These people are called determinists. According to Blackburn determinism advocates that “every event is the upshot of antecedent causes. The state of the world at any moment is the result of its state immediately before, and evolves from that preceding state in accordance with unchanging laws of nature.” This goes against free will because whatever choice we make down the road, our destination will not change. For example, imagine one night you die in your sleep, free will states that we would have made that choice to die, but clearly most people do not choose to die. But what if we were to say that you got murdered in your sleep? Was our fate determined to be a victim of crime? What about the murderer, was it by their free will to murder you? If your fate was predetermined to die in your sleep, then was the choice of death ever given? Based on this example free will could be observed as an illusion, but the question remains is the murderer going off his own free will? The murderer may have just been predetermined to murder someone that night, but it was by choice that they went to your room to murder you. This then leads to determinism being split into two types. Hard and soft determinism. Soft determinism or compatibilist determinism is the notion that determinism may be true, but that we also have free choice. Hard determinism also called incompatibilist determinism, is when free choice and