The movie Minority Report and the two passages Free Will and Determinism in the world of minority report and Oedipus the King all share a common discussion, if humans have free will when they know the future. Humans do have free will. It is their choice to find out about their future and it is also their choice to try to change whatever their future sentence may be. There are many different examples of knowing the future and deciding what to do about it in the movie and two passages.
In the movie a man named John Anderton works for the ‘precrime’ police. He is to stop people from murdering before it happens, with the help of three different humans with special powers (‘precogs’) to see murders being committed before they actually happen. They later find that the two of the three precogs thought one way of the murder and the other one thought another, later finding out that the one precog was seeing the correct murder. In the beginning of the movie the precrime police bust into an apartment of a man who they believe will murder his wife for cheating on him. They arrest him for the ‘future murder’ of killing his wife. John Anderton and the people who arrested the man don’t even know for a fact if he was really going to kill his wife.
While watching more of the movie you will see John Anderton with the more accurate precog. It has come to this part because the precogs had foreseen Anderton murdering a man, he didn’t even know. When he arrives to the place where he is supposed to murder this man, the precog tells John, he has a choice and doesn’t need to kill the man. He chooses to not kill the man. Right there you see that he did have free will, when the current events seemed to be his destiny in murdering a man.
In the passage called Free Will and Determinism in the world of minority report, they talk about how the only way to have free will is to have “two things: alternative possibilities and self-control.” It mentions how robots don’t have free will because they don’t have alternative possibilities, but when it comes to humans they almost always have alternative possibilities. They even have self-control it’s just their choice whether they practice it or not. If people were to be in a situation whether life or death, for example if someone is trying to shoot them and the only escape is to jump off a bridge into water, it’s his choice in which to make.
No matter if you get yourself in the situation or the situation comes to you, you always have a choice in the matter what to make. Like we mentioned in class, addiction can get out of control. When it comes to addiction, we have a choice to start it, than to keep going back to it, once we hit the addiction it’s your choice not to go to rehab. You may not want to stop or go to rehab but that doesn’t mean you don’t have free will. You might not like either choice that’s set upon you but you still have one, showing that people do have free will.
In the story of Oedipus and the King it starts out by Oedipus’ father going to an Oracle to find out the future about his soon to be born son Oedipus. The Oracle tells him that Oedipus will kill him, his father. With that the father goes to have him killed but the servant sends him away. There was no way to tell if he could stop Oedipus from killing him or not. So Oedipus grows up in a faraway land, to be nowhere near his father. The passage explains when Oedipus grows up he also goes to the Oracle to find out about his future. He hears the same thing his father had heard, that he will kill his father and because he does not know that he is ‘adopted’ he runs away to the land he was born to avoid killing his father. He enters the land he was born in and events occur in which he kills his real father. With these series of events it was all choice. He might not have known who his real father was but he chose not to stay where he was and make sure he did not kill the father he thought was his real father. That’s also when self-control would come into the picture, if he were to stay with the man he thought was his father. He would make sure that anger didn’t overpower him and kill the man, but because he tried to avoid it, it ended up coming true anyways.
People always have free will. With all the scenarios it’s uncertain if these things were to have happened, if they did things differently and if they weren’t so cautious, the previous events might not have come in play. When people know the future and they are not happy with it they try to change it and that’s what makes them achieve what was told to them. Even if you don’t know the future things may all fall into place or turn out bad depending on the choices you make. So when it boils down everyone has a choice in everything they choose to do. Which means that everyone has free will.
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