DETERMINISM is the view that all events without exception are effects or, a little more carefully, that every event is fully caused by its antecedent conditions or causal circumstances. The conditions or circumstances too are effects of prior sufficient causes, and so on. There are two sets of questions attending determinism. The first has to do with the proper characterization of determinism, and whether or not the thesis is true. The second concerns the implications of determinism for morality, religion, punishment, psychology and other such things which seem to depend on or presuppose the possibility of free choice or action. We will consider both sets of questions together; they are not easy to keep separate. Getting the thesis of determinism into clear view, putting flesh on the bare definition above, is not easy either. Determinism is sometimes explained by pointing to predictability. La Place, for example, maintains that if a powerful enough intellect knew all the facts about the location and motion of every particle in the universe, and knew too the laws of nature and a little mathematics, then it could in principle predict the location and motion of every particle in the universe at any time in the future. It is a compelling thought but not much help in clarifying the thesis of determinism talk of predictability seems to depend on or presuppose the thesis, rather than explain it. Some try to cash the thesis out in terms of current scientific theory, and certainly Newton s achievements led many to determinism. The clockwork picture of the universe, with all matter in motion in space obeying a set of causal laws, leads easily to the view that every event stands in a nomothetic relation to certain others preceding it in the chain. Recently, interpretations of Quantum Theory and the uncertainty principle have persuaded some that determinism must be false. However,
it is not obvious that micro-level events, about which Quantum Theory has something to say, have effects on macro-level events, about which the theory is largely silent and where determinism seems to matter. The things at the level of everyday observation seem bound up by causal laws, whether or not this is so for the particles of which they are composed. It is also true that freedom is not the same thing as indeterminism, uncertainty or chance. Philosophers, anyway, tend to take the long view, noting that scientific theories come and go. Tying the truth or an understanding of determinism to our current scientific conception of the universe, some might unkindly say our best guess, seems to many a little short-sighted. Philosophical views of determinism. What matters to us are not particles and quanta, but beliefs, desires, hopes and choices and this point can be made without begging any questions concerning the metaphysics of things like beliefs and desires. Even if one is unwilling to embrace a thoroughgoing materialism about the mind, it is at least a going proposition that mental events, whatever they are, stand in apparently causal relations to states of the brain. Brain states, it almost goes without saying, are as physical as anything. Even a dualist can be troubled by determinism. On most readings of the truth of determinism, the upshot is that human freedom is at best problematic. If every event is an effect of prior causes and, say, your choosing to look up determinism in this book is an event, then your choosing appears as causal as anything which might happen on a billiard table. It might have felt, on the inside, that you looked the term up on a whim or even for a good reason, but rewind the universe as far back into the past as you like and run it all forwards again, and causal forces will conspire to plant that whim or reason even the feeling
of freedom in your head and move your hand towards the bookshelf as certainly as a billiard ball follows a precise trajectory when struck at a certain angle. The point can be pressed further by thinking not of looking up a definition, but of acts we condemn as morally wrong or acts we praise as heroic. Is there room at all for free will in, as James puts it, the iron block universe? Philosophers have settled into two camps in response to this question. Incompatiblists maintain that if determinism is true, there can be no freedom. Some, notably Descartes, go on to deny the thesis of determinism outright, arguing instead for some doctrine of origination, an uncaused or self-caused act of will underlying free choice. Whether origination comes to much is uncertain. To wrench the will from the causal web entirely might result in freedom, but what help is an uncaused or random will? There might be other, empirical worries rooted in the study of human behaviour for thinking that Descartes has to be wrong in characterising the will as utterly undetermined. Other incompatibilists, so-called hard determinists, accept determinism and deny the existence of human freedom outright. Compatibilists, such as Hobbes and Mill, take it that freedom and determinism are compatible, arguing for a view of freedom understood in terms of voluntary or uncompelled action. A person in prison or forced into a course of action at gunpoint is not free, but individuals not so compelled might be. Freedom, on this view, is not a matter of uncaused or undetermined action, but voluntary action. The causal antecedents of free human actions are, as some put it, internal to the agent, consisting in his or her hopes, desires and general character, as opposed to causal factors outside the agent, such as handcuffs, hypnotists or prison walls. It is easy to feel a little short-
changed by compatibilism, as causal antecedents internal to an agent are still causal antecedents. The action, although voluntary, is still determined. Recently, Honderich has argued that compatibilism and incompatibilism are false, as they both suppose that we have just one conception of freedom, when in fact we have two. One conception involves origination and voluntary action, and the other involves just voluntary action. The upshot, for Honderich, has to do with attitudes, the response we give to the truth of determinism. On his view some positive or sustaining attitudes towards our life-hopes, moral responsibilities, and so on really are possible, once the two conceptions of freedom are recognized and thought through. Most arguments for versions of determinism depend on the claim that the thesis of determinism is just part of the warp and weft of human thinking. It is only on the assumption that every event has a cause that we can come to an understanding of the physical universe. While Hume argued that causal necessity is not, strictly speaking, in the world, seeing events as caused is part of the human factory specification. For Hume, thinking causally is not just the only way to understand the empirical world, it is something we cannot help, a natural custom or habit of mind. Kant took the so-called principle of universal causation as a fundamental category of the understanding, a part of the condition of the experience of an empirical world of objects. Without thinking causally, he argues, we could not have the experience we actually have. Seeing the world in terms of cause and effect is the only way to understand any object of knowledge. Determinism is not something we could give up; the question of determinism is not an open one.
No less forceful intuitions accompany the thinking in favour of freedom. The world we experience includes ourselves, and from the inside we do have the experience of freedom. It seems to us that there are moments of choice, instances in which it is up to us to take some action as opposed to another. Determinism might not be something we can give up with respect to an understanding of objects, but it is something we can scarcely take seriously with respect to an understanding of ourselves. We have just as much difficulty trying to understand an uncaused car accident as we have in genuinely accepting that our inner experience of freedom is an illusion. Even the hardest of hard determinists does not simply wait to see what he chooses for dinner. Although Kant argues that determinism is a precondition of understanding the empirical world, he maintains that freedom is no less a precondition of practical action. There is a distinction for Kant between thinking about objects and thinking about action, theoretical as against practical reasoning. We have no choice but to think deterministically if we want to know something about the world, and when we want to act, we cannot help but think of ourselves as free. Kant s line, it seems to many, underlines rather than resolves the difficulty. Religious controversies. Philosophical controversies concerning determinism are matched by those in theology, though the emphasis is clearly different. In Christian and other theologies, god is characterized as all-knowing, allpowerful, and all-good. Determinism can seem to follow quickly from these attributes. Reflection on the problem of evil and divine punishment and reward can tug in the opposite direction.
If god knows everything, this must include future facts, and the choices one has yet to make are among those facts. Presumably, god knows the choices we will make before we make them, and this suggests that our choices are not really choices at all. Either human beings are not free and god knows what we will do before we do it, or humans have a measure of freedom, compromising god s knowledge. If god s all-embracing knowledge is something the theist is not willing to dispense with, then human freedom has to give. There are obvious questions concerning the coherence of divine reward and punishment, heaven and hell, if it turns out that no one really chooses to seek or avoid salvation or sin. St. Augustine, and later Aquinas, argues that there is a distinction between knowing what will happen and causing what will happen. God knows what we are going to do because we are going to do it: our doing it is not caused by his knowing. Both thinkers maintain that worries about determinism and god s knowledge depend on temporal categories which do not actually apply to god. God s eternity, a kind of existence outside of time, makes it possible for him to observe all events at once or, better, independently of time. There is no real sense in which god knows about our choices before we choose them, as the very notion of before is not truly applicable to god s knowledge. Similar motivations for determinism arise in connection with the consideration of god s omnipotence. If human beings really are free, then there is a clear sense in which humans might confound god s plans, might do something god did not intend. Worse, for Luther and Calvin, the thought that freely chosen human action could, in a
sense, nudge a person towards salvation seemed to restrict god s power intolerably. By acting in a certain way, it would seem, a person could force god s hand, make god react appropriately by opening wide the pearly gates. For some thinkers one could be saved from sin not by human choice, but only by being chosen by god. Again, if human freedom is limited in this way, no sense can be made of divine reward and punishment. God s goodness, too, suggests a kind of determinism. The notion that a good creator could create only a good world, fixed on a settled path, was first scouted by the Ancient Greeks. The Stoics contended that nature was both divine and cyclical, consisting in eternally repeating cycles of life and cataclysmic conflagration. The Stoic s famous steadfast indifference to the vagaries of life is partially explained by their view that whatever happens, happens for the best, for the good aims of the universe itself. The view has echoes in Leibniz, who argues that the goodness of god implies that this world is the only world that god could have created, the best of all possible worlds. The question of human freedom also arises in controversies concerning the problem of evil, which might pull the theist away from determinism. The problem of evil, roughly, is the claim that the following four propositions are incompatible, that is to say that they cannot all be true together: god is omniscient, god is omnipotent, god is omnibenevolent, and evil exists. As the last is undeniable, one of the other three must be false, which amounts to the claim that god as traditionally conceived does not exist.
In response, some theists distinguish between natural evil and human or moral evil. The former are so-called acts of god, natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes. The latter is the evil that men do: war, murder, theft and so on. Natural evil is then explained away with talk of soul-building. The idea being that virtue requires a struggle against hardship, and natural evil is a kind of necessary test or midwife of the virtues. In any case, God is not responsible for human evil, it is argued, as this is the result of freely chosen human action. The gift of free will is itself good, it is claimed, and if we squander it on evil actions, the fault is our own. The free will defence, as it is called, is found wanting by some thinkers, particularly following reflection on god s attributes. If god is all-knowing, it is argued, he would have known beforehand the disastrous consequences of creating human beings with the capacity to choose evil. Knowing this, and equipping us with free will anyway, god seems ultimately responsible for the evil we choose. If god is all-powerful, why did he not design us so as to freely choose the good? There are replies to these questions, and replies to those replies. Nearby conceptions and the depth of the problem. The general thesis of determinism pursued here is not the only conception in the neighbourhood. Logical determinism, first noticed by the Ancient Greeks but still under consideration today, begins with the innocent claim that every statement is either true or false. Propositions about future human decisions or courses of action are statements, and they too must be either true or false. Logical determinism settles the future as clearly as other determinisms do but without talk of causation.
Doctrines of fatalism and predestination can also be distinguished from the general thesis of determinism. Fatalism is the view that no matter what one does, one s future or fate is settled. This implies that there is no point in planning, deliberating or preparing for the future. The idle argument, again first formulated by the Greeks, has it that if one is ill, there is no point in calling a doctor. If one is going to recover (or not), one will recover (or not) regardless of what the doctor or anyone else does. A determinist is committed to the view that all events are effects, not that some events are fated to happen regardless of the preceding causal path. Talk of predestination or destiny implies a supernatural cause in the chain, either setting the lot in motion for a general aim or fixing one s future for some particular end. Determinism as understood in most contemporary thinking has it that all causes are natural, not supernatural, and carries with it no commitment to the view that the causal sequence has some general aim or end. Reflection on the long pedigree of determinism and nearby conceptions can lead one to the view that the question of human freedom is an unusually deep one. Before even philosophy got underway, humans had suspicions deterministic in flavour, and those suspicions have proved remarkably resilient. Perhaps the earliest suspicions resulted from the difficulties attending a difficult life, the experience of trying and failing regardless. Some contemporary considerations of determinism retain something of this defeatism, a worry that what we do can make no difference, that the most human of concerns are based on an illusion, that our thoughts are not really our own. The ancient worries are still with us, because what is at issue is what matters most.
Controversies, both philosophical and religious, exhibit a pattern that is suggestive of the depth of the problem too. Both philosophers and theologians have bumped into a set of conflicting intuitions. Both are drawn towards determinism in an effort to understand what each take to be the fundamental nature of reality, as considered apart from human concerns. For the philosopher, this is a world of objects in causal relations, and for the theist, this is a creator or a created order. Both, too, are dragged away from determinism when the focus narrows to human interests. For the philosopher, there is the experience of freedom, and for the theist, there are the choices underpinning salvation and sin. The conflicting intuitions cannot both be right, but it is not clear that either set can be rejected. Bibliography Aquinas, T. Summa Theologica, Part I. ed T. Gilby, 60 vols, London, 1963 75. Ekstrom, L. W. Free Will: A Philosophical Study. Boulder: Westview, 2000. Hobbes, T. Of Liberty and Necessity in W. Molesworth (ed.) The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 5, London: Scientia Aalen, 1962. Honderich, T. A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and Life-Hopes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. ----------------- How Free Are You? The Determinism Problem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902. Kane, R. The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. McFee, G. Free Will. Teddington: Acumen, 2000. Mill, J. S. A System of Logic. New York: Harper & Row, 1874. Weatherford, R, The Implications of Determinism. London: Routledge, 1991.