Free Will & Maxims in relation to causation

A friend copies your homework and, when caught, says “I couldn't help it, everything is caused, I had no choice.” You don't accept that excuse, and neither does the law — both of you assume, every single day, that people can choose otherwise. But the last topic just showed you that every event has a cause. So how can human choice be free if it, too, is an event? This is the free will problem, and law's answer to it is written into a set of Latin maxims you are about to meet.

In two minutes

Law holds people responsible only if it assumes they were free to act otherwise, yet the same law also traces every wrong to its cause — and the maxims in this topic are the rules that keep that tension from collapsing the whole system.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Logic – II on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.