The Case Of Mr. Puppet - 1587 Words

The case of Mr.Puppet raises questions of determinacy with regards to the existence, or nonexistence as the case may be, of free will. The scenario presented is that a group of â€Å"evil† doctors managed to create and nurture a Hitler clone, named Mr. Puppet, to be evil. Mr.Puppet then embezzles money from a Lehman Brothers, a now defunct investment firm who is then caught in the act and murders the witness; Mr. Puppet is later arrested and the doctors come forward to say he is a victim of his circumstances. From this scenario one can see several clear questions which arise. The popular debate of nature versus nurture comes into question, i.e., is he evil because he is a clone of Hitler, because he was raised poorly, is it some combination of†¦show more content†¦One might think of a divine plan, or perhaps the big bang created a chain reaction which created conjunctions which are wholly unavoidable. This would be the world of the hard determinist, where there can be no room for freedom at all. In such a world Mr.Puppet is clearly not free to act and his responsibility and blameworthiness are certainly suspect. If he could not act otherwise how could one blame Mr. Puppet for doing what was the inevitable consequence of actions beyond his control. A soft determinist approach would agree with the doctrine, but argue there is room for freedom. In a soft determinist approach you might agree freedom exists for actions which are free from coercion of outside force, the passive-determinist approach, or you may be inclined to believe you can make decisions independent of past conditioning and cultural expectation because of your own self-awareness, the active-determinist approach. In these views there exists a determinacy of actions, but these actions are no longer linear. Here an individual makes a choice, whereby that choice was affected by certain contingent antecedent conditions and certain necessary antecedent conditions,.e.g., I could have chosen not do this assignment as equally as I have chosen to do it; which is the result of the antecedent conditions which led to it being assigned, which will then lead to further