possibility of there being various kinds of causes. This relates to our lives. We make plans and revise them. We explore alternatives and decide to follow one of them. We change a course of conduct we have started or we continue with it. In other words, there is a lot of self-responsibility that is evident in the way in which we look upon ourselves, and in the way we behave.There clearly are cases in conduct in which some people behave as they do because they were determined to do so by certain identifiable forces outside of their own control. A brain tumor, a sever child trauma, or some other force sometime incapacitates people. This is evident in those occasional cases when a person who engaged in criminal behavior has no control over what they did. Examples such as these, cannot be said to have free will. Those that deny that we have free will simply cannot make sense of our distinction between cases in which one controls ones behavior and those in which one is being moved by forces over which he or she has no control. Finally, what I have eluded to earlier, that when we put all of this together we get a more sensible understanding of the complexities of human life. We also get a better understanding, for example, of why there are so many cultural differences, why people cant work together, why there are problems in general. It is because they are free to do so, because they are not set in some pattern, the way cats and dogs and organisms tend to be.All of the behavior of these creatures around us can be predicted because they are not creative in a sense that they originate new ideas and behaviors, although we do not always know enough about the constitution of these beings and how it would interact with their environment to actually predict what they will do. Human beings produce new ideas and these can introduce new kinds of behavior in familiar situations. Yet we can make some predictions about what people will do in ...
