You will prepare and submit a term paper on Do You Agree with Determinism or Compatibilism. Your paper should be a minimum of 1250 words in length. Compatibilism is accepted in some societies and rejected in others because it simultaneously involves human freedom and unseen forces in the occurrence of human actions and events. In other words, it can be said that Compatibilism is the compatible version of determinism. Compatibilism associates free will to human actions whereas Determinism calls it an illusion. The following are two objections that are made while arguing about Compatibilism.

Compatibilism denies the inevitable causation that every effect has some cause attached to it and that this cause and effect relationship is always so strong that humans cannot show interference and they don’t possess any free will. For instance, if a student keeps on playing games a night before his exam he will get poor grades in his exam the next day and this is for sure because the cause ‘not studding’ preceded the effect as in the form of ‘poor grade’. Take one more example, it rains because water evaporated into the sky and forms clouds which rains to release water from them. Hence the cause ‘water’ precedes the effect ‘rain’. The bond between cause and effect is so strong that it does not allow the human free will and freedom to interfere. As contrary to Compatibilism, determinism gives more powerful explanations to the human actions and deeds as it is solely based on causation.

If humans have space for expressing freewill and freedom then a prediction cannot be made because it is only possible in the presence of causation. Compatibilism does not support the prediction of actions and events because things and consequences cannot be predicted if there are chances of human interference. As the human mind is the most unpredictable thing and when events are associated with the freedom of the human mind then it is almost impossible to predict the future. Moreover, Compatibilism rejects the concept of prewritten fate and destiny. Determinism says that everything that happened was the ‘only’ thing to happen there was no other thing that could happen instead.