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thumb Pierre-Simon Laplace
Determinism holds that each state of affairs is necessitated (determined) by the states of affairs that preceded it. Indeterminism holds that determinism is false, and that there are events which are not entirely determined by previous states of affairs. The idea of determinism is sometimes illustrated by the story of Laplace's demon, who knows all the facts about the past and present and all the natural laws that govern our world, and uses this knowledge to foresee the future, down to every detail.left Baron d'Holbach Some philosophers hold that determinism is at odds with free will. This is the doctrine of incompatibilism. Incompatibilists generally claim that a person acts freely (has free will) just in case the person is the sole originating cause of the act and the person genuinely could have done otherwise. This kind of free will is (at least allegedly) incompatible with determinism. If determinism is true, and everything that happens is completely determined by the past, including events that preceded our births, then every choice we make would ultimately be determined by prior events that were not under our control. Our choices would be just another outcome determined by the past. So if determinism were true, then we would be trapped by the past and free will would be an illusion. "Hard determinists", such as d'Holbach, are those incompatibilists who accept determinism and reject free will. " Libertarians", such as Thomas Reid and Peter van Inwagen , are those incompatibilists who accept free will, deny determinism, and instead believe that indeterminism is true. (This kind of libertarianism should not be confused with the political position of the same name.)
thumb Thomas Hobbes Other philosophers hold that determinism is compatible with free will. These "compatibilists", such as Hobbes, generally claim that a person acts freely just in case the person willed the act and the person could (hypothetically) have done otherwise if s/he had decided to. In articulating this crucial proviso, Hume writes, "this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains". Compatibilists often point to clearcut cases of someone's free will being denied — rape, murder, theft, and so on. The key to these cases is not that the past is determining the future, but that the aggressor is overriding the victim's desires and preferences about his or her own actions. The aggressor is coercing the victim and, according to compatibilists, this is what nullifies free will. In other words, determinism does not matter; what matters is that our choices are the results of our own desires and preferences, and are not overridden by some external (or even internal) force. To be a compatibilist, one needn't endorse any particular conception of free will (one need only deny that determinism is at odds with free will), but the positions canvassed here are typical of compatibilism.
Furthermore, it is often held that the phrase "free will" is, as Hobbes put it, "absurd speech", because freedom is a power defined in terms of the will, which is a thing--and so the will is not the sort of thing that could be free or unfree. Some compatibilists argue that this alleged lack of grounding for the concept of "free will" is at least partly responsible for the perception of a contradiction between determinism and liberty.
We generally hold people responsibleIn moral philosophy, the word responsibility has at least two related meanings: The obligation to answer for actions. Often this means answering to some specified authority. The recognition that in order to achieve one's purposes, one must act oneself ("t for their actions, and will say that they deserve praise or blame for what they do. However, moral responsibility is believed by many to require free will. Thus another important issue is whether we are ever morally responsible, and in what sense.
Incompatibilists tend to think that determinism is at odds with moral responsibility. After all, how can you hold someone responsible for an action that could be predicted from the beginning of time? Hard determinists say "So much the worse for moral responsibility!" and junk the concept — Clarence DarrowClarence Darrow ( April 18, 1857 March 13, 1938) was the lawyer who defended Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murder and defended John T. Scopes in the so-called "Monkey Trial", opposing Fundamentalist prosecutor William Jennings Bryan. He remains famo famously used this argument to defend the murderers Leopold and LoebNathan Leopold, Jr. November 19, 1904 August 29, 1971) and Richard Loeb ( June 11, 1905 January 28, 1936), more commonly known as Leopold and Loeb were two wealthy Jewish University of Chicago students who murdered Bobby Franks and received life sentences — while libertarians say "So much the worse for determinism!" This issue appears to be the heart of the dispute between hard determinists and compatibilists; hard determinists are forced to accept that we often have "free will" in the compatibilist sense, but they deny that this sense of free will truly matters — that it can ground moral responsibility. Just because an agent's choices are uncoerced doesn't change the fact that determinism robs the agent of responsibility.
Compatibilists often argue that, on the contrary, determinism is a prerequisite for moral responsibility — you can't hold someone responsible unless his actions were determined by something (this argument can be traced to Hume). After all, if indeterminism is true, then those events that are not determined are random. How can you blame or praise someone for performing an action that just spontaneously popped into his nervous system? Instead, they argue, you need to show how the action stemmed from the person's desires and preferences — the person's character — before you start holding the person morally responsible. Libertarians sometimes reply that undetermined actions aren't random at all, and that they result from a substantive will whose decisions are undetermined. This move is widely considered unsatisfactory, for it just pushes the problem back a step, and further, it involves some very mysterious metaphysicsMetaphysics is a branch of philosophy, and related to the natural sciences, like physics, psychology and the biology of the brain; and also to mysticism, religion, and other spiritual subjects. It is notoriously difficult to define, but for purposes of br.
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