Are we just animals driven by fundamental instinctual drives or robots whose behaviour is determined by simple input and output systems? Or are we beings who are responsible for our actions. Or is the feeling that we are originators of our actions just an illusion a bit like the spume on a wave thinking it is pulling the wave along?

If we aren’t free agents and everything is explicable by our genetic make up, envirnment and previous experience where does that leave morality and the law? Praise and blame look to be redundant.

Here are some pithy quotes quotes from great thinkers on the topic to get us started.

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“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past could be present before its eyes.”

~ Pierre-Simon Laplace (A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities) ~

Laplace wrote this in the Eighteenth Century as a kind of thought experiment and it has subsequently become known by philosophers as Laplace’s Demon. It captures the idea that science is about precise prediction and explanation of the whole of Nature viewed as a closed deterministic causal system. Pure determinism seems to have been undermined by quantum physics but is ‘indeterminism’ any better?

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“Thus determinism, with its correlatives, pessimism, cowardice, and bad faith, is not an intellectual doctrine but a moral attitude. It is an attitude of excuse; it is the claim that we are not responsible for our being, for our character, our passions, or our actions.” 

~ Jean Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le Néant, 1943) Part IV, Chapter 2, Section 1) ~

Sartre was writing in Paris during WW2 where he saw many Parisians  collaborating with the Nazis. Their excuse was that they didn’t have a choice. Sartre argues that there is always a choice and that we cannot evade our freedom.

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“In the free will context a lot is at stake; it’s a very big deal. Notions like punishment and human self-respect, justification for very important social practices and human interaction, the way we see ourselves and the way we see people that we appreciate or respect.” 

~ Saul Smilansky ~

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“If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequence of laws of nature and events in the remote past. Since it’s not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are, it would therefore follow that the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us. And it just seems obvious that we cannot be responsible for what is not up to us.” 

~ Peter van Inwagen (American philosopher) ~ 

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“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” 

~ George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four) ~

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Some Articles and Notes on Freewill and Determinism

Freewill and Determinism — An Introduction

Free Will vs Determinism — What ChatGPT says

Freewill from the Skeptics Dictionary

What is Determinism?

'Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not' by Dan Falk (2023)

Belief in Freewill causes changes in behaviour

Ten Myths about Freewill

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Freewill, Determinism, the Law, and Punishment

The Prince Andrew case   — a useful example for examining moral and legal responsibility

Virginia Giuffre’s story of abuse exposes impunity of powerful men

Criticism of Virginia Giuffre

Sam Harris’ example of determinism in a criminal case

The Hinckley Case

An example from Dr Gwen Adshead at Broadmoor Hospital

The Six Functions of Punishment

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What is Determinism?

Determinism is basically the idea that we may not know enough ever to predict the future with any great certainty, but the universe is essentially a kind of machine operating according to inviolable laws. And that means everything that happens must happen as a result of the playing out of these laws.

To use a somewhat outdated image, atoms bounce off each other, bind to each other, repel and attract each other, and everything we see, from grass growing to composers writing music, is at bottom the inevitable consequence of matter reacting to matter. Similarly, your thoughts and actions are produced by a brain which is just a complicated biological machine, which, like all such mechanisms, from broccoli to fruit flies, requires no free will to make it work.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman says he sees determinism as lying at the heart of the free will problem. "If you're looking at the brain, we always study it as a deterministic system: where this goes off, that trips off that neurotransmitter, that causes this to be polarised, and everything happens lock-step from everything else. The heart of the issue is, given that system, it seems hard to figure out how to slip anything else into there".

If we accept that all our actions are the inevitable result of causes over which we have no control, then we surely cannot in good faith continue to hold people morally responsible for their actions. If free will goes, it seems blame and responsibility must go too, and with them the foundations of law and morality.

Whenever there is a murder, for example, there is almost always a defence that the killer was himself the victim of forces beyond his control. After James Huberty shot and killed twenty-one people in San Diego in 1984, for example, it was claimed that his rage was the result of monosodium glutamate in McDonald's food and poisoning by lead and cadmium in fumes inhaled while working as a welder.

On the one hand, there is a recognition that we need to encourage a sense of responsibility so that people exercise their freedom constructively. (That's certainly how we try to raise our children). On the other hand, there is a steady trickle of information from science suggesting that we are hapless slaves to our genes, our childhood and our environment, and that free will is just a fantasy.

The real challenge to determinism comes from quantum physics. If quantum theory has got this basic claim right, then Laplace's Demon loses his power. It could not predict the future because not everything that happens according to physical laws inevitably happens.

But take away inevitability from the materialist world view, and you are still left with everything happening as a consequence of matter reacting to matter. The important point is not that everything happens in a way that is absolutely determined. What matters is matter: everything is simply the result of physical events behaving solely according to natural laws, deterministic or not.

In other words we have causal closure of the physical domain:  every physical event has a physical cause, and neither quantum physics nor chaos theory changes that.

If you zoom down to the most fundamental levels of physical reality, to atoms and beyond, the behaviour of every particle will be explained by its own nature, the nature of those around it and the laws of physics that govern them. Whether or not this makes every event predictable is beside the point. Whether the laws of physics are ultimately deterministic or whether probability has a role, the only causes of neurons firing are physical causes. And that's what leads people to worry about free will.

The root of scientific scepticism about free will is not determinism but materialism – the view that everything is constructed from physical matter. This kind of threat to our free will might be called a reductionist threat.

However, in his book Freedom Regained the philosopher Julian Baggini takes a more optimistic view known as 'Compatibilism'. He accepts that we are material beings subject to determinate causes but that we can still be responsible for our actions. But responsibility is a matter of degree and achievement rather than a steady-state.

“In order to make sense of free will we have to abandon the tendency to talk of choices being made by our brains, or our minds, or our rational or conscious selves. We have to think of the agents of choice as being us: the whole people we are. These whole selves sometimes do things consciously, sometimes unconsciously; sometimes after thought, sometimes automatically; sometimes on the basis of reasons, sometimes on the basis of emotion or instinct. What makes us free is that, taken in the round, we have a sufficient amount of control over what we do."