Determinism Vs Freedom

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In Greg Miller’s Wired article “Did Brain Scans Just Save a Convicted Murderer From the Death Penalty?”, John McCluskey, a prisoner escaped from an Arizona prison, carjacked a retired couple, shot them inside the camping trailer they were towing behind their truck and set the trailer on fire with their bodies still inside. Despite his reprehensible act of crime, John McCluskey’s lawyers successfully convinced the jury that the convict has several brain defects and that his action was a result of his impulsiveness as he is incapable of planning such things in advance. As a result, the jury decided that they had been unable to come to a consensus on the death penalty, in other words, John McCluskey is getting a life sentence without parole.  Suppose …show more content…
On the contrary, libertarianism chooses to reject determinism in the faces of freedom; libertarians believe that human are special and we, humans, alone transcend the laws of nature. And, there is soft determinism: a third option that chooses to embrace both freedom and determinism. Soft determinists resolve the conflict between freedom and determinism by redefining the concept of freedom. And, the best definition of freedom that soft determinists conclude is: “a free action is one that is caused by the person’s beliefs and desires, provided that those beliefs and desires flow from ‘who the person is’.” (p. 130) Furthermore, in Harry Frankfurt’s “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”, Frankfurt introduces a distinction between first-order desires and second-order desires. First-order desires are the desires to do certain things, whereas second-order desires are desires about what desires to have.  And, Sider believes that these first-order desires and second-order desires should flow from ‘who the person is’ in order to hold the person accountable for his/her actions.   In addition, in her article “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility”, Susan Wolf believes that there is a better version of freedom that we can want when it comes to holding somebody responsible for their

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