Free will vs Determinism

• Free Will vs Determinism:
• Free Will: The notion that humans can make choices and are not decided by biological or external forces.
• Is the humanistic approach free will or determinism? The Humanistic approach largely advocates free will.
• Rogers' CBT: Based on the idea that we can change our lives by seeing our situations differently.
• Self-actualisation


  Achieving one's full potential and realizing personal growth.
• Determinism: The view that an individual's behaviour is shaped by or controlled by an internal or external force - rather than an individual's will to do something.
• Hard Determinism: Implies that free will is not possible as internal or external events beyond our control always cause our behaviour.
• Fatalism: The belief that all behaviour has causes that we should be able to predict and describe.
• Soft Determinism: All events, including human behaviour, have causes but behaviour can also be decided by our conscious choices.
• William James: The first to come up with the idea of soft determinism.
• Biological Determinism: The belief that behaviour is caused by biological influences that we cannot control.
• Testosterone


  Linked to increased aggressive tendencies.
• Which type of determinism is the Fight or flight response? An example of biological determinism.
• Environmental Determinism: The belief that behaviour is caused by features of the environment such as systems of reward and control that we cannot control.
• Skinner: Described free will as an illusion and argued that all behaviour was the result of conditioning.
• Psychic Determinism: The belief that behaviour is caused by unconscious conflicts that we cannot control.
• Freud: Believed that free will is an illusion and that our behaviour is decided by biological drives and instincts.
• Freudian Slip: The idea that there is no such thing as an accident, also known as a parapraxis
• Strength of Determinism: AO3: - Determinism is consistent with the aims of science and suggests that behaviour can be orderly.

  - Conditions such as schizophrenia support more deterministic research and cast doubt over free will as no one would 'choose' to suffer this disease.

  - However, it could be argued that treating mental illness based on its biological causes, could result in other underlying causes such as trauma being ignored.

  - This matters because whilst the causal explanations provided by the deterministic approach have benefits to the health and well-being of main individuals, it is also important to avoid taking a narrower approach.
• Weakness of Determinism: A03: - Hard determinism and the belief that we are in no way in control of our behaviour is not consistent with how our legal system works which is a notion against determinism.

  - In a court of law, offenders are found personally responsible and morally accountable for their actions. If we follow a hard deterministic approach, then the actions of the offender were entirely in their control - which poses the question as to whether they should be punished or not.

  - In 1994, Stephen Mobley was convicted of the murder of a Domino's Pizza store manager.

  - Whilst on death row for the offence, the legal team discovered that he had a 'criminal' gene. He appealed not guilty; however, this was unsuccessful.

  - However, other instances of appeal have been more successful.

  - Buyout was given a 9-year sentence, which was cut after his mutated gene was discovered.

  - This has been important in the discovery in the field of criminal justice and led to the introduction of the Law of Diminished Responsibility.
• Strength of Free Will: AO3: - Every day experience gives us the impression that we exercise free will through the choices we make in everyday life. This gives the concept that free will has face validity.

  - Research suggests that those with a high internal locus of control tend to also be more mentally healthy.

  - Roberts et al (2000) demonstrated that adolescents with a strong belief in fatalism, the events are predetermined and therefore inevitable, were significantly more likely to develop depression.

  - A deterministic stance, however, would argue that the adolescents found to have a strong belief in fatalism and who suffered from depression, could also have had an underlying genetic disposition for depression, which is the cause of the fatalistic beliefs in the first stance.

  - This suggests that even if we do not have free will, the fact that we think we do have it is a positive effect on our mental health and wellbeing.