Introduction
Free will is the moral responsibility of one’s actions, which could not have done otherwise. Although various scholars have their contrasting definitions, they still agree that freedom should be free from coercion. Freewill doesn’t exist in a situation where individuals carry out specific actions without their will.
Ayer argues that an individual is held morally responsible for an action done on his own free will, given that he also had a choice of acting otherwise. Robert Kane states that free will influences actions done in the past. He argues that these past actions are the ones that determine our present actions, thus leading to our free will. He continues to state that there are determiners in the past, which influence the current free will of individuals such as culture, teachers, and elders. According to Ayer, free will cannot be determined as an individual chooses to do what he does at that moment out of his will despite having an alternative of doing otherwise.
The compatibilism in free will shows that an individual’s actions could be otherwise if that were his choice. In other words, those actions are voluntary and that no coercion has involved in invoking his present actions. As stated earlier in determinism free will, Robert argues that “If my choice is undetermined, that means I could have made a different choice given the same past right up to the moment when I did choose.” According to Robert, one has a choice to make out of his actions if his past isn’t determined.
Conclusion
It seems compatibilism cannot coexist with determinism. The free will of being influenced by past actions faces the critics of voluntary sense of activities. Determining one’s will from previous actions contradicts the voluntary will of doing what you could still have done.