Write a brief response to the following prompt (we’re expecting about a half-page).
Suppose that after thinking seriously and carefully about free will for a long time (reading lots of philosophy books about it, debating it with other researchers, and so on), you reached the firm conclusion that nobody ever acts freely or makes free choices. How do you think that might change the way you feel or react to situations like these:
Your roommate used up the last of your favorite coffee (again!) after you told her not to. Would you still resent her, if she had no choice and it wasn’t up to her?
Last year you had a challenging moral decision and ended up doing (what you think is) the right thing, even though it was really hard. You had been feeling proud of yourself for that. But could you still feel proud, if in fact you never really had a choice and it wasn’t up to you what the outcome would be?
We’re not expecting you to have done any structured systematic thinking yet about free will. This is instead an opportunity for you to begin working out your thoughts about it. And we’ll spend more time later in the semester talking about how philosophers write. For now, just try to express yourself as clearly as you can.
These exercises will be graded only: High quality/Satisfactory/Low quality.
Everybody must do this exercise.
We will grade your more substantial papers anonymously, and so you’ll have to prepare your papers for us to do that, but don’t worry about that for these exercises. For now, make sure your name is on your submission.
Unless/until you hear otherwise from your TAs, submit your exercises by mailing PDFs to them by the end of the day (11:59 pm) on Tuesday Jan 18. If you’re officially enrolled in one section but hoping to switch over to a different one, interpret “your TA” for these purposes to mean the TA for the section you’re now officially enrolled in.