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What role do socio-economic conditions in Springfield play in shaping…
What role do socio-economic conditions in Springfield play in shaping adolescents' beliefs about free will and moral responsibility?
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Determimism
However, someone can reject the argument against determinism by suggesting that we could still act freely even if our actions were pre-determined based on premises before we were born as long as we were unconstrained. To be unconstrained would mean that we are able to move our body in normal ways. This idea is known as compatible determinism or compatibilism (Carrol, 54).
A traditional argument against moral responsibility might say that since determinism is true, then every action is pre-determined by conditions before the birth of the agent which means that we can never act freely. If we can never act freely then we could not be morally responsible for our actions (Carrol, 52).
A book by Carrol and Markosian mentions an example where a person finds a wallet outside on the ground and takes the money out of it. Determinism suggests that the agent might have not been acting freely when taking money from the wallet because we live in such a deterministic world. This situation raises questions about morality of the situation since people might not have to be morally responsible for something that they did not act freely in (Carrol,46).
Determinism suggests that the future could be entirely fixed by the past by antecedent conditions (Carrol,45).
The belief that people do not control their own outcomes (external locus of control) has jumped more than three quarters over the past few decades (Carrol, 45)
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Free will
Believing in free will means that people think they can freely act to accomplish personal goals to overall improve their life. They might have an increased level of perceived autonomy which may make an individual more likely to have self-control (Li, 3).
Belief in free will is focused on agentic choice therefore makes a distinction between choices that are agentic and ones that are not. For free will to be present, there cannot be any influence on the external environment of the individual (5, Feldman).
Belief in free will is the core belief that people have the capacity to act freely or could have chose to do otherwise (2, Feldman)
Experiments done show that preschoolers can understand the difference between constrained vs. freely chosen actions. Furthermore, they can understand not only their own, but others' freedom of choice (91, Chernak).
Across ages, children in both the United States and Nepal supported the freedom of choice to perform simple acts such as choosing to drink milk instead of juice. However, they also recognized actions that can constrain choice such as gravity. This suggests that basic intuitions about freedom of choice and constraint are culturally universal and also arrive early in life (Chernak, 1351)
The study found that a stronger belief in free will was associated with increased life satisfaction in Chinese adolescents (Li, 4).
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Studies show that the more people endorse beliefs of free will, the more likely they are to advocate for harsher punishments against wrongdoing (7329, Martin).
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Studies show that belief in free will can have a positive influence on job performance. Those that exposed the philosophy that human action is freely chosen were willing to expand resources necessary for controlled regulation of behaviors. On the other hand, disbelief in free will was associated with an impulsive style of action control that undermines effective work (48, Stillman).