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Hard determinism (or metaphysical determinism) is a view on
free will Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded. Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, sin, and other judgements which apply only to acti ...
which holds that
determinism Determinism is a philosophical view, where all events are determined completely by previously existing causes. Deterministic theories throughout the history of philosophy have developed from diverse and sometimes overlapping motives and consi ...
is true, that it is incompatible with free will, and therefore that free will does not exist. Although hard determinism generally refers to
nomological determinism Determinism is a philosophical view, where all events are determined completely by previously existing causes. Deterministic theories throughout the history of philosophy have developed from diverse and sometimes overlapping motives and consi ...
, it can also be a position taken with respect to other forms of determinism that necessitate the future in its entirety. Hard determinism is contrasted with soft determinism, which is a
compatibilist Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent. Compatibilists believe that freedom can be present or absent in situations for re ...
form of determinism, holding that free will may exist despite determinism. It is also contrasted with metaphysical libertarianism, the other major form of incompatibilism which holds that free will exists and determinism is false.


History


Classical era

In
ancient Greece Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity ( AD 600), that comprised a loose collection of cult ...
,
Socrates Socrates (; ; –399 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no te ...
initiated the rationalistic teaching that any
agent Agent may refer to: Espionage, investigation, and law *, spies or intelligence officers * Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another ** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuranc ...
is obliged to pursue the chief good conceived by his or her mind.
Strato of Lampsacus Strato of Lampsacus (; grc-gre, Στράτων ὁ Λαμψακηνός, Strátōn ho Lampsakēnós, – ) was a Peripatetic philosopher, and the third director ( scholarch) of the Lyceum after the death of Theophrastus. He devoted himself espec ...
speculated that an unconscious divine power acts in the world and causes the origin, growth, and breakdown of things.
Diodorus Cronus Diodorus Cronus ( el, Διόδωρος Κρόνος; died c. 284 BC) was a Greek philosopher and dialectician connected to the Megarian school. He was most notable for logic innovations, including his master argument formulated in response to Ari ...
asserted the identity of the possible and the necessary and inferred that future events are as determined as the past ones.
Chrysippus of Soli Chrysippus of Soli (; grc-gre, Χρύσιππος ὁ Σολεύς, ; ) was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was a native of Soli, Cilicia, but moved to Athens as a young man, where he became a pupil of the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes. When Clean ...
refuted the " idle argument" invented to discredit determinism as if human efforts were futile in a preordained world; he explained that fated events occur with the engagement of conscious agents. The
Bhagavad Gita The Bhagavad Gita (; sa, श्रीमद्भगवद्गीता, lit=The Song by God, translit=śrīmadbhagavadgītā;), often referred to as the Gita (), is a 700-verse Hindu scripture that is part of the epic ''Mahabharata'' (ch ...
, a classical Indian text composed around 4th century BCE, also mentions hard deterministic ideas. Krishna, the personification of Godhead, says to Arjuna in the verse 13.30:


Modern era

In the 17th century, both
John Locke John Locke (; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism". Considered one of ...
and
Baruch Spinoza Baruch (de) Spinoza (born Bento de Espinosa; later as an author and a correspondent ''Benedictus de Spinoza'', anglicized to ''Benedict de Spinoza''; 24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, b ...
argued for strict causality of volitional acts. In the age of enlightenment, Baron d’Holbach promulgated the naturalistic interpretation of mental events.
Arthur Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer ( , ; 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work ''The World as Will and Representation'' (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the prod ...
observed that everyone regards himself free ''
a priori ("from the earlier") and ("from the later") are Latin phrases used in philosophy to distinguish types of knowledge, justification, or argument by their reliance on empirical evidence or experience. knowledge is independent from current ex ...
''; however, ''
a posteriori ("from the earlier") and ("from the later") are Latin phrases used in philosophy to distinguish types of knowledge, justification, or argument by their reliance on empirical evidence or experience. knowledge is independent from current ex ...
'' he must discover that he had been obliged to make the decisions he actually made.
Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his care ...
noticed that free decisions are graded as ''
causa sui ''Causa sui'' (; ) is a Latin term that denotes something that is generated within itself. Used in relation to the purpose that objects can assign to themselves, the concept was central to the works of Baruch Spinoza, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sar ...
'', emerging from non-existence.


Contemporary history

Recently,
Daniel Wegner Daniel Merton Wegner (June 28, 1948 – July 5, 2013) was an American social psychologist. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University and a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy ...
stressed the limitations of free will on grounds of experimental evidence for unconscious choice and action. To prove determinism, the following putative experiment was proposed: all principal differences between the features of an artificial
zygote A zygote (, ) is a eukaryotic cell formed by a fertilization event between two gametes. The zygote's genome is a combination of the DNA in each gamete, and contains all of the genetic information of a new individual organism. In multicellula ...
and that developing naturally can be avoided.


Overview

Meeting a challenge, agents make decisions in conformity to the inherited character, life history, and current stimuli. The field of acute attention is limited, and motives partly remain unconscious. From the first person's perspective, we have an intuitive commitment that many options are available. However, if the total of the mental content is considered from the third person's perspective, only a single decision deemed by the agent as the most favorable at the moment turns out real. The validity of causation for any mental event becomes apparent taking into account their neurophysiological correlates. Different causal descriptions correspond to the mental and physical domain. Laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics govern the latter. Admitting downright mental causation of physiological impulses would mean surplus determination. The surmise that under identical conditions, alternative decisions and actions are possible is disproved by naturalists as an illusion. Hard determinism is not taken to refer merely to a determinism on earth, but in all of reality (e.g. involving the effects of light from other galaxies, etc.); not just during a certain deterministic period of time, but for all time. This also means that the relation of necessity will be bi-directional. Just as the initial conditions of the universe presumably determine all future states, so too does the present necessitate the past. In other words, one could not change any one fact without affecting the entire timeline. Because hard determinists often support this eternalist view of time, they do not believe that there are genuine chances or possibilities, only the idea that events are 100% likely.Hoefer, Carl.
003 003, O03, 0O3, OO3 may refer to: *003, fictional British 00 Agent *003, former emergency telephone number for the Norwegian ambulance service (until 1986) *1990 OO3, the asteroid 6131 Towen * OO3 gauge model railway *''O03 (O2)'' and other related ...
2016.
Causal Determinism
(revised). ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy''.
Unlike "law fundamentalists", some philosophers are "law pluralists": they question what it means to have a law of physics. One example is the "Best Standards Analysis", which says that the laws are only useful ways to summarize all past events, rather than there being metaphysically "pushy" entities (this route still brings one into conflict with the idea of free will). Some law pluralists further believe there are simply no laws of physics. The
mathematical universe hypothesis In physics and cosmology, the mathematical universe hypothesis (MUH), also known as the ultimate ensemble theory and struogony (from mathematical structure, Latin: struō), is a speculative " theory of everything" (TOE) proposed by cosmologist Ma ...
suggests that there are other universes in which the laws of physics and fundamental constants are different. Andreas Albrecht of
Imperial College Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...
in London called it a "provocative" solution to one of the central problems facing physics. Although he "wouldn't dare" go so far as to say he believes it, he noted that "it's actually quite difficult to construct a theory where everything we see is all there is." The feasibility of testing determinism is always challenged by what is known, or what is thought to be known, about the idea of a final, all-encompassing,
theory of everything A theory of everything (TOE or TOE/ToE), final theory, ultimate theory, unified field theory or master theory is a hypothetical, singular, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all asp ...
. Some physicists challenge the likelihood of determinism on the grounds that certain
interpretations of quantum mechanics An interpretation of quantum mechanics is an attempt to explain how the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics might correspond to experienced reality. Although quantum mechanics has held up to rigorous and extremely precise tests in an extraord ...
stipulate that the universe is fundamentally
indeterministic Indeterminism is the idea that events (or certain events, or events of certain types) are not caused, or do not cause deterministically. It is the opposite of determinism and related to chance. It is highly relevant to the philosophical prob ...
, such as the
Copenhagen interpretation The Copenhagen interpretation is a collection of views about the meaning of quantum mechanics, principally attributed to Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. It is one of the oldest of numerous proposed interpretations of quantum mechanics, as featu ...
; whereas other interpretations are deterministic, for example, the De Broglie-Bohm theory and the
many-worlds interpretation The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts that the universal wavefunction is objectively real, and that there is no wave function collapse. This implies that all possible outcomes of quantum me ...
.
Chaos theory Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary area of scientific study and branch of mathematics focused on underlying patterns and deterministic laws of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, and were once thought to have ...
describes how a deterministic system can exhibit perplexing behavior that is difficult to predict: as in the butterfly effect, minor variations between the starting conditions of two systems can result in major differences. Yet chaos theory is a wholly deterministic thesis; it merely demonstrates the potential for vastly different consequences from very similar initial conditions. Properly understood, then, it enlightens and reinforces the deterministic claim.


Implications for ethics

Hard determinists reject free will. Critics often suggest that, in so doing, the hard determinist also rejects
ethics Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns m ...
. The key to this argument rests on the idea that holding a person morally responsible requires them to make a choice between two, or more, truly possible alternatives. If choice is indeed impossible, then it would be incorrect to hold anyone morally responsible for his or her actions. If this argument holds, hard determinists are restricted to
moral nihilism Moral nihilism (also known as ethical nihilism) is the meta-ethical view that nothing is morally right or wrong. Moral nihilism is distinct from moral relativism, which allows for actions to be wrong relative to a particular culture or indivi ...
. This feature, however, is tenable only as far as hard determinists discard responsibility. In a necessitarian world, recourse to merit and blameworthiness is toned down while adherence to ethical and legal values is not ruined. Persons may be appreciated as carriers, executors, and defenders of morality. Alternatively, the choice to be regretful of past misdeeds becomes unreasonable. Nevertheless, one can admonish oneself for one's lapses and resolve to avoid similar behavior in the future. Those hard determinists who defend
ethical realism Moral realism (also ethical realism) is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion), some of which may be true to the extent that they ...
would object to the premise that contra-causal free will is necessary for ethics. Those who are also ethically naturalistic may also point out that there are good reasons to
punish Punishment, commonly, is the imposition of an undesirable or unpleasant outcome upon a group or individual, meted out by an authority—in contexts ranging from child discipline to criminal law—as a response and deterrent to a particular act ...
criminals: it is a chance to modify their behaviour, or their punishment can act as a deterrent for others who would otherwise act in the same manner. The hard determinist could even argue that this understanding of the
true True most commonly refers to truth, the state of being in congruence with fact or reality. True may also refer to: Places * True, West Virginia, an unincorporated community in the United States * True, Wisconsin, a town in the United States * ...
and various causes of a psychopath's behaviour, for instance, allow them to respond even more reasonably or compassionately. Hard determinists acknowledge that humans do, in some sense, "choose," or deliberate—although in a way that obeys natural laws. For example, a hard determinist might see humans as a sort of
thinking machines Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachuset ...
, but believe it is inaccurate to say they "came to a decision" or "chose". Generalization of event causation should circumvent overstatement of external impulses.
Autotelic An autotelic is someone or something that has a purpose in, and not apart from, itself. Origin The word "autotelic" derives from the Greek ''αὐτοτελής'' (''autotelēs''), formed from ''αὐτός'' (''autos'', "self") and ''τέλος ...
personalities show a high rate of activities all by themselves. The capacity to resist psychological assault is impressive evidence of autarkic resources. Determinists even admit that with corresponding knowledge, changes in the genetic depository and consequently behavior are possible. Up to now, the concepts and terminology of legal affairs follow the pre-reflexive belief in alternative possibilities. As scientific insight advances, the juridical attitude becomes increasingly "external": there should be fewer emotions about offender's will and more concern about the effects of offenses on society. The retributive function of punishment should be rejected as irrational and unjustified. "Lex talionis" is discarded already because of deficient correlation between crime and penalty. If the inveterate notion of "mens rea" is used at all, then only to distinguish intentional actions from inadvertent ones and not to designate an autonomous undertaking of the lawbreaker. At the same time, it is justified to require the perpetrator to critically reconsider his intentions and character, to demand apology and compensation in victims' favor. The rehabilitation service should be used to train the risky circle for keeping the norms of social life.


Psychological effects of belief in hard determinism

Some behavioral anomalies have been observed in persons cultivating the habit of causal awareness. Increased aggressiveness, excessive compliance, and reduced helpfulness are reported. Critical assessment of one's own former conduct appeared abated.
William James William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the la ...
was an American pragmatist philosopher who coined the terms "soft determinist" and "hard determinist" in an influential essay titled "The Dilemma of Determinism". He argued against determinism, holding that the important issue is not personal responsibility, but
hope Hope is an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes with respect to events and circumstances in one's life or the world at large. As a verb, its definitions include: "expect with confidence" and "to cherish ...
. He believed that thorough-going determinism leads either to a bleak
pessimism Pessimism is a negative mental attitude in which an undesirable outcome is anticipated from a given situation. Pessimists tend to focus on the negatives of life in general. A common question asked to test for pessimism is "Is the glass half empt ...
or to a degenerate
subjectivism Subjectivism is the doctrine that "our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience", instead of shared or communal, and that there is no external or objective truth. The success of this position is historically attribute ...
in moral judgment. He proposed the way to escape the dilemma is to allow a role for chance. James was careful to explain that he would rather "debate about objects than words", which indicates he did not insist on saying that replacing determinism with a model including chance had to mean we had "free will." The determinist would counter-argue that there is still reason for hope. Whether or not the universe is determined does not change the fact that the future is unknown, and might very well always be. From a naturalist point of view, a person's actions still play a role in the shape of that future. Founder and director of the Center of Naturalism, Thomas W. Clark, explains that humans are not merely the playthings of patterned, natural forces in the universe—but rather we are ourselves examples of those forces. The deterministic view aligns our representations with the faculties and possibilities we actually possess but it should avoid misleading introspection. Admitting agents' dependence on a drastic background can enhance insight, moderate severity and spare unproductive suffering. Insofar as the mind comprehends universal necessity, the power of emotions is diminished.de Spinoza, Benedict.
677 __NOTOC__ Year 677 ( DCLXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. The denomination 677 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar e ...
2009. ''
Ethics Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns m ...
'', translated from R. H. M. Elwes. part V, proposition VI.


See also

*
Laplace's demon In the history of science, Laplace's demon was a notable published articulation of causal determinism on a scientific basis by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814. According to determinism, if someone (the demon) knows the precise location and moment ...
*
Superdeterminism In quantum mechanics, superdeterminism is a loophole in Bell's theorem. By postulating that all systems being measured are correlated with the choices of which measurements to make on them, the assumptions of the theorem are no longer fulfilled. ...
* Semicompatibilism


References

{{Determinism Determinism Metaphysical theories