From what I've seen and heard, the world is governed by rules, and these rules, though some of them may seem as insignificant as anything, have been serving as guidelines to prevent humans from doing whatever they like, especially when it comes to acts that could harm other humans or nature. Hence, humans have no free will if we look at it critically. Society, both when we were born and as it is today, has been governed by guidelines that appear in the form of ethics. These are not necessarily laws enforced by the government or the governing body of a community, but we have accepted them as a way of life. Even when we go against them without being caught, our conscience judges us.
Take a look at this:
At one point or another, every person on earth has experienced, or will experience, the urge to be intimate with someone they have just seen on the road. I mean that brief imagination of seeing someone and having lustful thoughts or wishing they could have their way with that person on the spot. However, they couldn't or wouldn't act on those thoughts because doing so on the street, or even approaching someone casually without finding out whether the person is married or not, could be considered unethical. Does this mean that the law or nature forbids humans from being intimate? Hell no! But at that moment, whatever the person is thinking about doing goes against the ethics of living in a society. At that moment, when a human being has a desire but cannot act on it, they are technically not exercising their free will. I mean, there is no free will.
If there were no laws and no ethics...
Many times, I have allowed my brain to wander far enough to imagine how we would have lived on this earth if there were no laws to guide us and everyone had the right to do whatever they liked. I have imagined a lot of nonsense, and in those moments, none of my imaginations actually made any sense. I couldn't fully comprehend it because everything has been governed by ethics and laws since the beginning of human existence. For example, according to the biblical account from which we Christians derive our understanding of the first humans on earth, the two people God created at the beginning almost had their free will, but there was a restriction on just one thing. When they got tired of the usual way of life, they decided to try to gain 100% free will, and it backfired.
If we were allowed to do whatever we liked, the world would not have been what it is today, unless, perhaps, humans were not created with the ability to differentiate between good and bad. In that case, we would simply be living anyhow, and even animals would be better than us.
Thanks for reading.
Photo: Chatgpt
