Position: Free Will Vs. Determinism Debate Essay

Free Will and Determinism

From a theological viewpoint, human free will may not exist at all, since God is all-knowing and all-powerful, the destiny of each individual is determined from the beginning to time. Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards all believed this, and before modern times it was the most common position in Christianity. Human life is also determined by certain physical and natural laws that exist in the material world, such as gravity, conservation of energy and chemistry, and perhaps by genetics as well. In addition, unfavorable environments and family life in childhood may also have a deterministic effect on individuals, such as a propensity to be involved in crime and drug abuse. Some people are more obviously constrained than others, such as alcoholics, drug addicts and insane persons, or those locked up in prison or some other institution where their lives are mostly determined by some external coercive authority. It is not difficult to find many such constraints on human beings, to which David Hume would have added culture, education and socialization, which were the real causes of most behavior (Notes 1/10). On the whole, though, so many limits exist on the freedom of the human will, that determinism of one variety or another seems to be the most valid explanation for the actions of individuals. For most of human history, when individual rights and political freedom did not exist, such determinism has indeed been quite blatant.

Hume argued that human behavior was uniform and predictable, and that it necessarily had to be in order for society to function at all. Without such order and predictability, the only result would be chaos and irrationality, so political and social life depend on the belief that human behavior is constant (Hume, p. 59). When people act in an irrational or unpredictable manner, then some explanation is called for about why they deviated from expectations.Certainly in Great Britain of the 18th Century, the society with which Hume was the most familiar, the legal system was based on the concept that each individual was responsible for their actions unless they were obviously insane, and this is also the case in the United States today. Hume gave an example of the prisoner in chains who is obviously lacking in free will because he cannot leave and his life is determined and controlled by the jailer. Yet the jailer also operates under certain constraints, such as his desire to obey the law and also to perform his duties well, so he will not let the prisoners escape. Nor would it be in his self-interest to do so since he might end up in jail himself, or at the very least lose his job and no longer be able to feed his family. Only if he had some secret reason to sympathize with the prisoner might he act in an unpredictable way and help him escape, but it would have to be a very compelling reason to inspire him to take such a risk that would not be in his own interest.

Roderick Chisholm would have been far less certain about attempting to predict what the jailer and the prisoner would have done in this situation, no matter what their motives, beliefs and inclinations. Both determinism and indeterminism were incompatible with responsibility for Chisholm, since if events had no cause then no one is responsible for anything, while if all actions were predestined by God or….....