Free Will and Determinism

It has been a long historical debate of whether determinism is compatible with free will or not. If not, there would be no free will. Thus no one is morally responsible for anything. I will argue in this essay for the incompatibilist argument. If determinism is true and incompatible with free will, then the existence of free will would be ruled out, so is moral responsibility. However, the opposite view, compatibilism, is underlying. It offers a solution for the incompatibility between determinism and free will, because it claims that free will is the necessary condition of moral responsibility. The compatibilist also denies that determinism has the consequences incompatibilist thinks it has. Overall, I think determinism is incompatible with holding people responsible for their actions, and will attempt to demonstrate the argument for incompatibilism.
There are various accounts of free will. Thomas Hobbes thought that “a free agent is he that can do as he will, and forbear as he will, and that liberty is the absence of external impediments”. Accordingly, freedom means that one can do what he wants to do without being restricted by externalities (Hobbes, 1997).   However, this is equally true of a mechanical robot and no source of someone’s internal motivation is involved. David Hume on another hand suggested that free will is the “power of acting power of acting or of not acting, according to the determination of the will: that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may.… This hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains.” He argued one’s psychological state actually plays a great role on determining his will (Hume, 1978). Nonetheless, if free will is, according to Hobbes and Hume, to say that an agent can choose his course of action and not being restricted by external obstacles, then animals would also have this kind of free will.
Moral responsibility is a concept...