Free Will and Determinism
Revision Powerpoint
Key Words to be happy with
 Free will – autonomy, freedom to choose on the basis
of reason
 Scientific worldview - every event has a cause eg
cognitive science (the mind is like a computer)
 Determinism or necessity – everything is subject to the
laws of cause and effect
 Hard determinism – free will is an illusion because the
will is causally predetermined
 Compatibilism – free will is real even though the will is
causally determined: freedom requires determinism.
 Libertarianism – free will is a metaphysical idea so
freedom and determinism are incompatible.
Key assumptions
 Hard determinists assume free will means a causally
determined act over which I have no control.
 Compatibilists assume freedom means “absence of
constraint”.
 Libertarians assume freedom means “subject to reason
alone”, outside of the scientific realm of cause and
effect.
Honderich’s viewpoint
 Honderich is a hard determinist.
 Our wills are causally determined.
 Freedom means “without strict causal antecedents”.
 Free will is incompatible with determinism.
 Therefore we have no free will.
Hume’s viewpoint
 Note: Bowie* incorrectly labels Hume a libertarian.
Hume is a compatibilist or soft determinist.
 Free will means “absence of constraint”.
 Constraints could be psychological (eg mental illness),
physical (eg lack of strength) or logical (eg I can’t be in
two places at once).
 Free will requires necessity (Hume’s word for
determinism) for without a cause, our wills would be
random.
 AJ Ayer is a modern compatibilist (see Freedom and
Reason)
*Ethical Studies 2 edition page 93
nd
Kant’s viewpoint
 Kant is a libertarian, and his key assumption is
autonomy (self-rule or freedom with reason).
 Free will belongs to the realm of ideas (the noumenal
world or world of things in themselves where concepts
like space, time and causation exist).
 Moral acts can only be moral if they are free, coming
from reason alone (a priori reason, meaning before
experience).
 CA Campbell (1976) is a modern libertarian. He sees
freedom at points of struggle with decisions, ie “it
could have been otherwise”.
Problems with different
viewpoints
 Honderich’s view seems to abandon hope for
controlling our futures.
 Hume’s view seems to take a rather minimal view of
freedom (isn’t freedom a power, as Hume himself
suggests?). Key question: could I have done
otherwise? Honderich says “no”.
 Kant’s view seems to divide human experience
between the realm of reason, of pure ideas (called the
noumenal world), and the realm of cause and effect
(which he calls the phenomenal world).
AJ Ayer’s view
 Ayer (1910-1989) argues that determinism is
misleading idea suggesting “one event is in the power
of another” rather than just factually correlated.
Caused does not mean forced.
 Laws of nature aren’t prescriptive in the way laws of
the country are prescriptive....they don’t place eg the
human will under obligations. They simply lay down
established patterns in the nature of things.
 “The laws of mechanics do not compel the planets to
move in their orbits; they simply describe planetary
motion.”
DJ O’Connor , Free Will (1971:73)
Behaviourism and psychology
 Freud and Laplace were hard determinists (will and
conscience come from our upbringing)
 Skinner argues we are conditioned to behave by
experiences (Pavlov’s dog). So we can condition new
types of behaviour (eg advertising…where Skinner
made a fortune in the USA).
 JB Watson argues that if we change people’s
environment we can change their behaviour (genes
and environment are important).
Some films you could mention
 A Clockwork Orange takes a hard determinist view: we
are compelled by both internal and external
constraints.
 Truman Show starts with Truman inhabiting a hard
determinist world where everything is programmed.
But Truman uses reason to work this out and break out
of John Locke’s locked room (see textbook for Locke’s
analogy). So in the end this is a Kantian, libertarian
view.