Freewill and Determinism

Discuss the apparent incompatibility between freewill and determinism. Is there a satisfactory soft determinist account of freedom? If so, what is it? If not, what is the best such account and what objections does it face?

The incompatibility between freewill and determinism lies in our contradictory beliefs in both freedom and science.

We, as human beings, all believe that we have freewill as we can freely choose our human actions, which cannot be predicted. For example, although I chose to eat bread for my breakfast every morning before today, it does not mean that I must eat bread today as I can still choose to eat congee as my breakfast. My behavior is chosen out of my freewill.

Because of our belief in freewill, we talk about morally responsibility. If our actions are not free, then we would not have to be morally responsible for our actions. The notion of freewill is necessary as the concept of moral responsibility is based on freewill.

On the other hand, we also believe in science which successfully uses different causes to explain the law of nature. We believe in the Newton's theory of gravitation that uses the concept of gravity to explain the falling movement of apples from a tree. Science tries to use causes to explain everything in the universe, including human behavior in the natural world and therefore human actions are predictable.

Determinism suggests that every event has a cause, which refers to an earlier event that makes a later event happen. As we believe in science and causes explanation, it is reasonable for us to believe in determinism as well.

Determinism suggests that though sometimes we cannot detect all the causes of our human actions, causes are really there and therefore, human actions are caused by earlier events. For example,

Event: I chose to eat McDonald's.

Earlier event (cause to 1): I felt hungry.

Earlier event (cause to 2): I saw a McDonald's advertisement.

Earlier event (cause to 3): I turned on the television...

From the above example, it can be shown that we can actually trace back the causes of our events one after another indefinitely. In this way, it seems that every human action is caused by events that take place before our birth and this would imply that we, human beings, are not free regarding any of our actions as we cannot control events before birth at all.

In sum, it seems that our belief in freewill and determinism are incompatible and contradictory to each other as determinism would imply a rejection of freewill.

The rejection of freewill in favour of determinism is called "hard determinism", which results in too strong explanatory power that anything anyone does is caused by events that happen before birth and we have no choice at all. On the other hand, the rejection of determinism in favour of freewill is called "libertarianism", facing the problem that if human actions are uncaused, it seems to imply that the actions are random. Random actions, however, cannot justify that human actions are free.

As it is not reasonable to reject either one of the concept of freewill or determinism, "Soft Determinism" states that the two concepts can indeed exist together as they are compatible as long as there is a new definition of the concept "freewill". According to soft determinists, freedom is not uncaused. Freewill is defined in terms of causes in a way that our actions can still be free. As an action can be both free and caused, there is compatibilism between freewill and determinism. However, so far, there is still not a satisfactory soft determinist account of freedom because each new definition faces different objections as illustrated below.

1st definition: An action is free if it is caused in the right way.

This definition implies that actions with causes do not mean that they are free. Only those actions with causes and at the same time, being caused in the right way are counted as free. According to soft determinism, it matters how an action is being caused. The rule of morality does not view all causes as being alike in determining whether an action is free or not. Causes are different, depending on what kind of causes they are. If an action is caused in a right way, the rule of morality counts that action as free, vice versa.

However, as this definition accepts that actions are caused, it implies that again, an action can possibly be caused by events occurring before our birth and therefore, it does not really