School (yawn) report

This is one of the assignments I did this past week for my ethics class (which I think is a cruel class to make a half-demoness take). It was in answer to a question about how much responsibility a person has with free-will.

Free will or not free will, and how can we ever tell for sure which one is accurate? If someone knows what the future holds, then there would not be any free will because the way events and actions will occur has already been determined. We could no more alter the future than we could alter the past. The best that we would have is a mere illusion of free will with no more actual power to shape events than the characters in a book could change the story that they are in. If that is the case then we have no responsibility for our actions since there is absolutely no way at all to change our behavior. However, since we have no practical way of knowing if free will is simply an illusion, we have to assume that we are in control of our choices. That means that we are responsible for what we do and how we do it. Of course there are various degrees that lessen the levels of that based on the mental capacity of the person involved. Obviously a small child is unable to make an advanced moralistic judgment as hopefully compared to an adult. Then there are people who are stricken with diseases of the mind which limit their understanding of ethical concerns as well. For the most part we are able to take full credit for our actions with only an occasional lessening based on unique situations where rash decisions or desperation was required such as the “kill or be killed” scenario.

(Afterthoughts)
I have gotten into arguments with my apartment's local self proclaimed prophet over free will several times already and had to rewrite that posting a few times before I could turn it in since I turned extremely vindictive and angry in my writing as the memories of our fights surfaced in my typing. It is annoying to fight with someone who thinks we have no free will because god knows everything, including the future which means events are already set, then turns around claiming that we can still make choices. Argh!!!!