Position: Free Will vs. Determinism Debate

Free Will and Determinism

From a theological viewpoint, human free will may not exist at all, since God is all-knowing and all-powerful, the destiny of each individual is determined from the beginning to time. Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards all believed this, and before modern times it was the most common position in Christianity. Human life is also determined by certain physical and natural laws that exist in the material world, such as gravity, conservation of energy and chemistry, and perhaps by genetics as well. In addition, unfavorable environments and family life in childhood may also have a deterministic effect on individuals, such as a propensity to be involved in crime and drug abuse. Some people are more obviously constrained than others, such as alcoholics, drug addicts and insane persons, or those locked up in prison or some other institution where their lives are mostly determined by some external coercive authority. It is not difficult to find many such constraints on human beings, to which David Hume would have added culture, education and socialization, which were the real causes of most behavior (Notes 1/10). On the whole, though, so many limits exist on the freedom of the human will, that determinism of one variety or another seems to be the most valid explanation for the actions of individuals. For most of human history, when individual rights and political freedom did not exist, such determinism has indeed been quite blatant.

Hume argued that human behavior was uniform and predictable, and that it necessarily had to be in order for society to function at all. Without such order and predictability, the only result would be chaos and irrationality, so political and social life depend on the belief that human behavior is constant (Hume, p. 59). When people act in an irrational or unpredictable manner, then some explanation is called for about why they deviated from expectations. Certainly in Great Britain of the 18th Century, the society with which Hume was the most familiar, the legal system was based on the concept that each individual was responsible for their actions unless they were obviously insane, and this is also the case in the United States today. Hume gave an example of the prisoner in chains who is obviously lacking in free will because he cannot leave and his life is determined and controlled by the jailer. Yet the jailer also operates under certain constraints, such as his desire to obey the law and also to perform his duties well, so he will not let the prisoners escape. Nor would it be in his self-interest to do so since he might end up in jail himself, or at the very least lose his job and no longer be able to feed his family. Only if he had some secret reason to sympathize with the prisoner might he act in an unpredictable way and help him escape, but it would have to be a very compelling reason to inspire him to take such a risk that would not be in his own interest.

Roderick Chisholm would have been far less certain about attempting to predict what the jailer and the prisoner would have done in this situation, no matter what their motives, beliefs and inclinations. Both determinism and indeterminism were incompatible with responsibility for Chisholm, since if events had no cause then no one is responsible for anything, while if all actions were predestined by God or some other cause, then no individual choice or responsibility can exist. . For Hume, responsibility required causation and even the very concept itself was derived from personal experience. Chisholm agreed that people are the primary causes and movers of their own actions, and that in the case of immanent or direct causation there is no other cause. Yet he denied that any exact science of humanity was possible, beyond describing what individuals would be inclined or motivated to do under a given set of circumstances. Thomas Hobbes argued that to know what a person wills or desires, and how strongly, would then indicate "just what it is that he will do -- or more accurately just what it is that he will try, set out, or undertake to do," but Chisholm agreed with Immanuel Kant, however, that no connection existed between motivation and desire and what a person might attempt to do (Chisholm, p. 397). Finally, Chisholm believed that many people refrained from doing evil because they simply lacked the opportunity or had never been placed in a sufficiently tempting situation. For example, a politician who was informed that bribe money will be placed in his garage has the choice about whether to take it or not and perhaps might not be able to resist doing so even if he did not solicit the bribe. He might not have the power to ensure that the money is not placed in his garage in the first place, although his free will still matters in deciding what to do with it (Chisholm, p. 398).