Post #7 Free Will – Hard Determinism

     One issue that is given just as much light as ethics is the debate of free will. Since the time of the original philosophers, the question has been posited as to whether the actions of man and the universe have been predestined since the original impetus, or if destiny is malleable enough that we control our own individual fates with all events being anything but certain. The first theory that we will look at is that of hard determinism.

    Hard determinism is one of two incompatibilist theories. Incompatibilism is a form of theory in the free will debate which claims that free will and determinism are unable to exist simultaneously, and one is necessarily true while the other must be necessarily false. Hard determinism is the theory which states that determinism must be true and any belief in the existence of free will is false. Hard determinism views reality almost like an endless line of dominoes. One event occurs, necessitating another event, and then another, ad infinitum. For example, suppose you stub your toe. You might believe that you have the options to go get an ice pack, walk it off, or collapse on the couch, and you decide to just walk it off. To you, the agent, you feel that you made the decision to walk it off. The hard determinist, however, would posit that your decision to walk it off was destined from the start, likely because a previous event inclined you towards that action, and there was an action that acted as cause of it. This fact will prove that hard determinism is a theory oriented completely around cause and effect, as nothing in the universe has happened, is happening, or will happen spontaneously, and there will always be a cause for an action.

    For this, there is likely to be what most people might consider a problem in the area of morality. For the hard determinist, every event and action had a previous cause that necessitated its existence, as previously established. However, to use this logic would mean that every moral action we commit is no longer our fault, as the culpability must lie in some previous person or event that causes us to act in such a way. As such, a large concern is that the existence of ethics and morally right and wrong actions is impossible in a hard deterministic world. However, some hard determinists do not believe in this moral nihilism, but in a view called ethical realism, where ethics are produced based on objective features in the world, meaning that though they do not believe in choosing moral decisions, they do acknowledge the existence of moral punishments.

    Hard determinism is a fatalistic view, which might cause a nihilistic and pointless view of life, but others might look at life with relief, with a view that pressure is not completely entombing them in misery and struggle. How one might view hard determinism is up to interpretation. The next topic we will observe is that of the opposite end of the spectrum of free will – libertarianism, where free will reigns.

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