Monthly Archives: April 1999

Secondary Effects

Free Will: The dilemma is ongoing…

I feel that humans must possess free will, and must not accept any less than absolute free will. If free will isn’t what humans have, what is the point of living; it wouldn’t matter anyway since our futures are set. Radical free will is a possibility and should be the human’s goal.

I feel that the argument of free will coincides with the argument for God’s existence. If God exists, our free will is limited because God would know what would happen to us and we can not escape those inevitabilities. On the other hand, if God doesn’t exist, then free will is ours; not just free will, but absolute free will.

I feel that Compatibilists answer the problem these two dangling questions leave us, concluding that free will is compatible with law-governess. This argument satisfies my thoughts on free will. I feel that if humans did not have free will, they would go nuts. How would I be able to make decisions in life, if every time, I kept asking myself if that was the decision I was supposed to make? It wouldn’t matter anyway, if we didn’t have free will, because since the day we were born, everything we would do was planned out already.

Susan Wolf, an intelligent philosopher, has thrown in her arguments towards Compatibilism. She states crude compatibilism as an action is free just in case it stems from your own desires. This opens up many elements within the deep-self view.

The Compatibilist’s view greatly depends on the acceptance of the Sane Deep-self View. This states that an action is free just in case it stems from your desires and those desires are under the control of your deep-self, and your deep-self is sane. This view also entails that a person’s deep-self is sane if that person is properly connected to the world both normatively and cognitively. They must know the difference between right and wrong, and the difference between fact and fantasy.

The deep-self view is correct in pointing out that freedom and responsibility require humans to have distinctive types of control over our behavior. Precisely, “our actions need to be under the control of ourselves, and our superficial selves need to be under control of our deep selves.”1

In order to be free and responsible, we need to be able to remove old desires and traits we see not needed. We need to revise ourselves, as Harry Frankfurt put it. This improving of ourselves is implicitly in the sane deep-self view. The sane deep-self view also implies that for us to be responsible for our actions, we have to be responsible for our selves. We must have the ability to evaluate ourselves sensibly and accurately, and have the ability to transform ourselves in response to our evaluation.

One problem with the Compatibilist’s view on free will is that they assume an objective standard of right and wrong. The problem lies in the fact that right and wrong are relative to individuals and customs within a culture. There is no “across the board” moral standard.

A second problem is that on the Sane Deep-Self View, no one will be responsible for any wrong doings, because no wrong doings will be free. This is due to the view that the only explanations for a wrong doing are that they had a wrong desire not under the control of their deep-self, or their deep-self is not sane.

The Compatibilist’s view creates yet another hindsight. This view develops a lack of moral responsibilities. If no one were morally responsible for their actions, we would not have any premise to punish such a person, because their act was against their will. This is where, I feel, the problem arises. At what point do determinism and indeterminism meet, if at all? There is a lot of gray in between the two; enough to create a view such as compatibilism.

In a world as uncertain as ours, with enough evil to wipe this planet out from under us, we can not take such a position when prosecuting such acts. Although a person might not be normatively or cognitively connected to the world, they were still prevalent to the society in which they intended to destroy. These people may not be morally responsible, but they still are physically responsible for their wrong-doings.

Susan Wolf analyzes that her view may be too closely connects sanity and being right about the world.

One response Susan Wolf mentions is that sanity is the ability cognitively and normatively to understand and appreciate the world. “According to our commonsense understandings, having this ability is one thing and exercising is another…”2

The sane deep-self view posed by Susan Wolf was not meant to answer all the philosophical problem emanated by the topics of free will and responsibility. If anything, this view highlights some of the practical and empirical problems, rather than attempting to answer such an intense question.

Another argument towards free will is the reasoning made from professional and amateur sports. Are the outcomes of these contests really predetermined? Why would one actually put an effort into such an event if the effort would not play a part in the outcome? This reasoning makes the Compatibilism argument favored in my mind. If the world is deterministic, there has to be some leeway made towards partial free will in the argument of sporting events, for example.

A further argument I will implement in my discussion of free will is based on the field of medicine. Are these doctors and nurses messing up the “system” God has put forth for us? It would seem that they are since the day the victims were born, they were to die on that day, yet these souls have helped them to survive. Are these professions even necessary? God knows when it is our time, and if it’s not, won’t our determined future already keep us from becoming distinct.

I, for one, can not except the view of determinism. If we weren’t really free, would we be arguing against it? There would be no reason to. But because we are free, we feel an urge to find out more about this world, and the meaning of it all, when it may just be we are looking too hard. I will have to conclude that I agree with most of what Susan Wolf has to offer us. She seems to understand that the majority of people think that the world is deterministic, and she found a layer beyond that. Free will exists. We have free will.

1,2: Susan Wolf, Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility

Secondary Effects

Automobile Emissions: The Crisis Continues

One problem that is plaguing today’s air quality is automobile emissions. Emissions from a single car is not that great, but with the number of cars in the United States as high as it is, and increasing at the rate it is, the personal automobile is the single most polluter in cities across America. “Driving a private car is probably a typical citizen’s most polluting daily activity.”

Burning fuel in an engine produces the power needed to get a car moving. Pollution from cars is formed by the by-products of the combustion process, known as exhaust, and from the evaporation of fuel itself. The gasoline and diesel fuels that are used to supply power to the engine are mixtures of hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are compounds made up of carbon and hydrogen atoms.

In a “perfect” combustion process, the oxygen in the air would convert all the hydrogen in the fuel to water and all the carbons to carbon dioxide. The nitrogen in the air would remain unaffected.

Ideal Combustion:

Fuel (hydrocarbons) + Air (oxygen and nitrogen) –> Carbon Dioxide (CO2) + Water (H2O) + unaffected nitrogen

But in reality, the combustion process isn’t “perfect” and does not convert all the hydrocarbons to water and carbon dioxide. The automobile engines emit several types of pollutants.

Actual Combustion:

Fuel + Air –> unburned hydrocarbons + Nitrogen Oxides (NOX) + Carbon Monoxide (CO) + CO2 + H2O

When unburned hydrocarbons react with nitrogen oxides and sunlight, ground-level ozone is formed, which is a major component of smog. Although ozone (O3) in the upper atmosphere is natural and protects life on earth by filtering out ultraviolet radiation, at ground level, ozone is a health problem. “It irritates the eyes, damages the lungs, and aggravates respiratory problems.” Ozone is also the most widespread urban air pollution problem.

Nitrogen oxides are formed under the high pressure and temperature conditions in the engine. Nitrogen oxides help form ozone and contribute to the formation of acid rain. Carbon monoxide occurs when carbon in the fuel is “partially oxidized, rather than fully oxidized to carbon dioxide.” This is an example of the incomplete combustion.

Carbon monoxide is a colorless, odorless, and poisonous gas. It has been long recognized as a serious problem to one’s health. Lawmakers have attempted to remedy this issue.

Another way emissions are extracted into the air is by way of fuel evaporation (see diagram). With the advances of controls of automobile emissions, fuel evaporation is rising as the majority of pollution. There are four ways in which fuel evaporation occurs: diurnal, running losses, hot soak, and refueling.

Gasoline evaporation increases as the temperature increases with the day, heating the fuel tank and venting gasoline vapors. This is called diurnal evaporation. Running losses occur as the car is running. The hot engine and exhaust system can allow for gasoline vapor release. Hot soak evaporation occurs as the car is cooling down. After the engine is shut off, the engine remains hot enough to release gasoline vapors. The gasoline tank is always filled with gasoline vapor. When the attendant refuels the gas tank, these vapors can exit and enter the atmosphere. This is refueling evaporation.

The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, recognized automobile emissions were going to be a problem in 1970, when the government passed the Clean Air Act of 1970 into law. This gave the EPA authority to regulate motor vehicle pollution. The EPA, since 1970, has progresses to become stingier as the years went on. EPA standards dictate how much pollution automobiles may emit, but the automakers are the ones who decide how to achieve such standards.

In the early 1970’s, automakers installed a catalytic converter that was designed to convert carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide. These converters reduce carbon monoxide emissions by as much as eighty percent.

In the past decade, the federal government required gasoline to be less volatile in the summer, for the reason vapors would not escape into the air and create ground-level ozone. To promote better fuel combustion, oxygen-containing compounds may be added to gasoline. This practice is implemented where carbon monoxide is known to be a serious problem. Other changes in the composition of gasoline, such as reducing benzene, toluene, and xylene, reduce ozone-forming pollutants.

As the EPA looks to the future with the automobile emissions problem, they foresee a switch to fuels that are cleaner than today’s gasoline. There are several choices including alcohols, natural gas, propane and electricity. These fuels are cleaner due to the fact that they do not contain toxics, e.g. benzene, and because their simple compounds do not yield complex combustion by-products.

I feel a move to ethanol based fuel would create a better situation for the world. Although the ideal scenario would be to drop oil as our main fuel for such things as automobiles, it would create economic stress on many countries that depend upon their sale of oil. Another option I would conclude with implementing would be to add yet another catalyst to the engine that would completely combust the hydrocarbons and leave the nitrogen unobstructed. This, I feel, would abolish the problem that occurs when the nitrogen forms nitrogen oxides, and allows oil to still be used as a major financial backbone in the world. That is, until oil runs out…