Complete Test Bank Chapter 6 Freedom

Chapter 6: Freedom

Test Bank

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 1

1. Sir Arthur Eddington advanced the claim that every event in the universe was predictable.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 2

2. Kierkegaard argued that one is responsible for whatever one was and that self-conscious choice and commitment were the factors that made a person most human.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 3

3. Most contemporary philosophers believe in soft determinism, the view that human freedom and determinism are compatible positions.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 4

4. Many scientists now agree that the concept of “cause” does not apply to certain subatomic particles, making the hard determinist view false.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 5

5. Hume defended a soft determinist position.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 6

6. Mill began by rejecting determinism and the idea that all human actions were “necessary and inevitable” given their causes.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 7

7. Some feminists understand sexual objectification as the primary process of the subjection of women.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 8

8. Kant denied determinism.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 9

9. Fatalism is the view that whatever a person’s actions and circumstances, his or her predetermined end is inevitable.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 10

10. Oedipus the King is a literary exercise in exploring the freedom of the will and the notion that a predetermined end is impossible.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 11

11. The Western concept of “nihilism” is similar to the Eastern concept of “nothingness.”

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 12

12. Kierkegaard called karma the sickness unto death.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 13

13. Predestination depends on particular antecedent conditions.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 14

14. Hard determinism depends on particular antecedent conditions.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 15

15. A sufficient cause is incapable of bringing the event about by itself.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 16

16. Prayer in Islam is the ego’s escape from mechanism to freedom.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 17

17. Daniel Dennett, argues that determinism is dismissed, in part, because of popular images that associate it with particular “bogeyman” images that he thinks are absurd.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 18

18. The model of determinism can be put this way: To say that every event has its cause is to say that if certain antecedent conditions are satisfied, then we can predict that such and such will occur.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 19

19. The model of indeterminacy can be put this way: Not every event has its sufficient natural cause.

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: Chapter 6 Question 20

20. Indeterminacy guarantees free will.

a. True

b. False

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 1

1. Soft determinism is also known as __________.

a. indeterminism

b. compatibilism

c. fatalism

d. free will

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 2

2. The view of many theologians that our every action is known by God is called __________.

a. theism

b. omniscience

c. the free choice of the will

d. predestination

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 3

3. Determinism is the thesis that every event has its __________ natural causes.

a. irrelevant

b. sufficient

c. determined

d. free

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 4

4. Sartre was a defender of __________.

a. freedom

b. feminism

c. determinism

d. totalitarianism

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 5

5. Aristotle’s view of __________ means factors unknown to the agent influences his or her choices.

a. society

b. determinism

c. ignorance

d. karma

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 6

6. Which of the following is assumed when we hold people accountable for their actions?

a. Free will

b. Karma

c. Universal law

d. Nihilism

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 7

7. Is it possible to have free will but not freedom?

a. No, there’s always a way to do what you will. So, as long as you have a free will, you have freedom.

b. No, it’s not possible to have either. Both are illusions.

c. Yes, you could be constrained and unable to exercise your free will.

d. Yes, you are always free in your mind, even though there is no freedom in the physical, deterministic universe.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 8

8. In the ancient Greek tragedy, Oedipus the King, Oedipus and Iocasta behave in a way that exemplified the concept of __________.

a. karma

b. fate

c. determinism

d. compatibilism

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 9

9. Why did God give free will to people if He knew that people would use it to sin, according to St. Augustine?

a. Because God hoped they wouldn’t.

b. Because God is not all-knowing and did not anticipate that outcome.

c. Because God is not all-powerful and couldn’t prevent people from sinning.

d. Because justice, punishment, and reward, is one of the goods that is from God.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 10

10. According to the Yoruba philosophy, what determines a person’s fate?

a. One’s self (free will of the soul)

b. God

c. Ori

d. Karma

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 11

11. Which of the following names did Dennett give to the notion that we are automata without free will and at the mercy of brute causation?

a. Zomboid

b. Mechanoid

c. Mechanish

d. Sphexish

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 12

12. According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, if you know the location of a subatomic particle, then you __________.

a. also know the momentum of it

b. can’t know the momentum of it

c. also know the size of it

d. can’t know the size of it

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 13

13. Quantum theory asserts the indeterminacy of __________ particles.

a. macroscopic

b. electromagnetic

c. subatomic

d. gravitational

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 14

14. When a drug addict wants to have his or her drug of choice but at the same time wants to quit, he or she has a conflict of first-order desires. If the addict desires to have only the desire to quit, this desire is called __________, according to Frankfurt.

a. second-order

b. abstinence

c. third-order

d. self-forming choice

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 15

15. B. F. Skinner’s method of controlling animal and human behavior and changing it for the better through conditioning is based on a belief in __________.

a. coercion

b. divine intervention

c. indeterminism

d. determinism

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 16

16. Indeterminism claims that not every event has its sufficient natural cause; however, indeterminism still does not leave room for ____________________ because random, uncaused events are not caused by agents either.

a. faith

b. soft determinism

c. free will

d. determinism

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 17

17. Kant claimed that the basic rule of determinism, _______________, was one of the rules by which we must interpret every experience.

a. the principle of universal causation

b. the principle of universal freedom

c. the principle of universal soft determinism

d. the principle of universal indeterminism

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 18

18. __________ determinists believe that we are “matter in motion,” physical bodies that are subject to all of the laws of nature.

a. Soft

b. Hard

c. Moderate

d. Most

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 19

19. The key to the _____________ position is that an action or a decision, although fully determined, is free if it “flows from the agent’s character.”

a. soft determinism

b. Indeterminism

c. Consequentialism

d. Incompatibilism

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 20

20. The _____________ claimed that only God is free and that all human actions are determined by God.

a. Christians

b. Buddhists

c. Ash'arites

d. Mu'tazilites

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 21

21. _____________ summarized the problem of freedom and one Christian solution to it: God made human beings free because He is all good, and free actions are better than unfree ones.

a. Frankfurt

b. Kant

c. Sartre

d. Augustine

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 22

22. The ancient Greek tragedies depend on _____________, the view that whatever a person's actions and circumstances, however free that person may seem, his or her predetermined end is inevitable.

a. predestination

b. free will

c. fatalism

d. chaos

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 23

23. _____________ is the view that our every action (and every event in the universe) is known, if not also caused in advance, by God.

a. Predestination

b. Free will

c. Fatalism

d. Chaos

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 24

24. _____________ was a hard determinist.

a. LaPlace

b. Sartre

c. Kant

d. Mill

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 25

25. _____________ offered various fictions to facilitate thinking about problems with traditional accounts of determinism that presented “truly frightening bugbears” as means of presenting the question of free will.

a. Sartre

b. Mill

c. Eddington

d. Dennett

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 26

26. Many philosophers have argued for _____________, the view that human freedom and determinism are compatible positions.

a. determinism

b. hard determinism

c. soft determinism

d. incompatibilism

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 27

27. _____________ defended the hard determinist viewpoint so uncompromisingly that he shocked even his colleagues as well as many traditionalists.

a. Hume

b. Kant

c. Sartre

d. d’Holbach

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 28

28. In novels such as George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, a _____________ view of human nature is attacked as potentially creating the philosophical basis of societies more oppressive and authoritarian than any we have even seen.

a. free will

b. soft determinist

c. determinist

d. compatibilist

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 29

29. _____________, who uses Freud and psychoanalysis as the basis for his claim that all our acts are compelled and not free, insofar as all our acts are brought about by a set of psychological determinants over which we have no control.

a. Frankfurt

b. Hospers

c. LaPlace

d. Kant

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 30

30. _____________ presented a similar but more joyous sentiment on the importance of freedom than Dostoyevsky.

a. Thich Nhat Hanh

b. LaPlace

c. Frankfurt

d. Sartre

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 1

1. Compare and contrast hard determinism, soft determinism, and indeterminism. Explain why indeterminism is just as problematic as hard determinism. From which two traditions of physics do these views arise?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 2

2. Compare and contrast fatalism and karma. Which view makes the most sense?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 3

3. Explain the concept of predestination. Which is the Islamic conception of predestination? Contrast this view to the Western religious view.

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 4

4. Write your account of a debate between Sartre and Frankfurt on the existence of freedom.

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 5

5. Argue for the position that freedom means simply “not constrained.” Can this position be reconciled with the idea that freedom means “could have done otherwise”? Why or why not?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 6

6. Would you rather be a gear in a big deterministic machine or some random swerving probabilistic atomic particle in an indeterministic system? If every action (including yours) in the universe is determined, then you don’t have freedom. If every action (including yours) in the universe is random, then you don’t have freedom. If every action (including yours) is a percentage of each, then you don’t have freedom. Is there another alternative that can save your freedom?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 7

7. Does it make sense to praise or blame someone for something that person had no control over? If she couldn’t do otherwise, would there be any justification for accolades or punishment? Discuss the correlation between moral responsibility and free will.

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 8

8. How are fatalism, hard determinism, and predestination different? Common street lingo may use these terms synonymously; however, there are important distinctions for the philosopher. What are they?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 9

9. Discuss Dennett’s insight that whenever philosophers or laypeople worry about whether we have free will, they mount illicit arguments (straw man fallacies) that some rival agent is involved. They then show how ludicrous it would be to assume that a rival agent is vying for control of our bodies and minds, thereby taking away our free will (or preventing us from having it in the first place). However, without these “bogymen,” as Dennett put it, to anchor the philosophical discussions, the idea of a natural lack of free will would not be so strange. Why did Dennett think agency confound the discussion?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 6 Question 10

10. Consider Robert Kane’s notion of “self-forming choices.” The idea is that we create our characters and dispositions by the ongoing choices we make, that is, we create our selves. Discuss how this might come about in the physical sense, according to Kane. He suggested that there is a “stirring up of chaos in the brain that makes it sensitive to micro-indeterminacies at the neuronal level.” How would moments of self-formation actually alter neuronal processes? How might you go about designing an experiment to test this hypothesis?

Type: fill-in-blank

Title: Chapter 6 Question 1

1. The tragic figure __________ famously made many efforts toward avoiding his prophesied fate.

a. Oedipus

Type: fill-in-blank

Title: Chapter 6 Question 2

2. In Buddhism, all human __________ are gestures of attachment to the physical world, each one binding its maker more and more to a difficult fate.

a. choices

Type: fill-in-blank

Title: Chapter 6 Question 3

3. __________, or freedom, is not a freedom of the self or the individual. In fact,
it is a freedom from the self and the individual, achieved only when there is no longer a self at all.

a. Nirvana

Type: fill-in-blank

Title: Chapter 6 Question 4

4. __________ is the view that our every action (and every event in the universe) is known, if not also caused in advance, by God.

a. Predestination

Type: fill-in-blank

Title: Chapter 6 Question 5

5. The contemporary American philosopher __________ argued that freedom meant that we are free to choose what we shall do and that our decisions are effective.

a. Robert Kane

Type: fill-in-blank

Title: Chapter 6 Question 6

6. The philosopher __________ had such confidence in the Newtonian system that he claimed that if he knew the location and motion of every object in the universe, he could predict the location and motion of every object in the universe at any time in the future.

a. Pierre Simon La Place

Type: fill-in-blank

Title: Chapter 6 Question 7

7. African Yoruba philosophy is founded on a variant of __________.

a. determinism

Type: fill-in-blank

Title: Chapter 6 Question 8

8. According to __________, an act is compulsory “when its origin is without” such that the person who acts “contributes nothing to it.”

a. Aristotle

Type: fill-in-blank

Title: Chapter 6 Question 9

9. The basis of __________ or __________ is that we somehow carve a space within determinism for those actions that we insist on calling “free” and for which we hold ourselves and other people responsible.

a. compatibilism, soft determinism

Type: fill-in-blank

Title: Chapter 6 Question 10

10. The __________ claimed that human freedom is consistent with God’s power by distinguishing between two types of action, or causality.

a. Mu’tazilites