Soft Determinism
Determinism currently takes two related forms: hard determinism and soft determinism [1][1]. Hard determinism claims that the human personality is subject to, and a product of, natural forces. All of our choices can be accounted for by reference to environmental, social, cultural, physiological and hereditary (biological) causes. Our total character is a product of these environmental, social, cultural, physiological and hereditary forces, thus our beliefs, desires, values and habits are all outside of our control. The hard determinist, therefore, claims that our choices are determined by these factors; free will is an illusion because the choices and decisions we make are derived from our character, which is completely out of our control in creating. An example might help illustrate this point. Consider a man who has just repeatedly stabbed another man outside of a bar; the other man is dead. The hard determinist would argue that there were factors outside of the killer’s control which led him to this action. As a child, he was constantly beaten by his father and was the object of ridicule and contempt of his classmates. This trend of hard luck would continue all his life. Coupled with the fact that he has a gene that has been identified with male aggression, he could not control himself when he pulled the knife out and started stabbing the other man. All this aggression, and all this history were the determinate cause of his action.
Soft determinism touts itself as a looser form of determinism; it maintains that a modicum of freedom can exist within determinism. For the soft determinist, the personality or character of the agent is still derived from environmental, social, cultural, physiological and hereditary factors. The agent’s actions are still a result of this character. However, the soft determinist maintains that we are free because freedom is not a freedom from all causes but is a freedom from some causes. One might argue that there was no compulsion in the action of the killer; he knows the consequences of his actions and is aware that murder is wrong. If someone held a gun to his head and told him to stab the other individual, we could not rightly state that his actions were free if there is some external compulsion. His personality is created within a context that instills certain societal values and norms of behavior...
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...cal or intellectual need. If this were so, she would not have conceived of herself as spiritually lacking. It is only in reflecting on her present condition that she may then understand herself as spiritually deficient; through this present understanding of herself she is able to negate her present situation by turning her attention towards fulfilling this need, giving her action of fasting meaning. That is, the cause of her act of fasting is not derived from some past or present determinate but rather is derived from a future possibility which is presently non-existent. In contrast, the suffering (i.e., hunger) of a depressed person is (usually) a result of that depression; the suffering just happens to the person. The suffering the depressed person is feeling is only a cause of the lack of active sustenance, and thus the suffering is not valued in and of itself by the individual. Our choices and actions, therefore, gain purpose because we reflect upon ourselves and conceive not only who we were and who we are, but who we desire to be. It is because we can actively respond to this self-conception and self-projection that we have free will and our lives are, in turn, meaningful.
In Nancy Holmstrom’s Firming Up Soft Determinism essay she set out to prove that people can have control over their desires and beliefs, and therefore are in control of the sources of their actions. She believed it was possible to carry on the view of soft determinism and still hold that we are free to choose and we are at times able to do otherwise. She believed that the standard soft determinist position was inadequate. Her thought was that soft determinists had too limited of a notion of what is required for an agent to be in charge of their actions. The common soft determinist stance was that the
The strongest objection to determinism is in my view the following: (3) Truth, i.e., accurate knowledge of the facts of a case is only possible for me when I can cognitively get involved with the subject. However, the precondition for this is that I am not determined by irrelevant constraints in connection with the subject — e.g., by physical factors or by my own biological-genetic constitution, but also not by prejudices and preconcieved notions: precisely because I could not involve myself in the subject because of such constraints. Reduced to a formula, this means: truth presupposes freedom.
In life we are constantly questioning why people act the way they do. A determinist would say that freedom of choice couldn’t always be possible because our actions are determined by things that are way beyond our control. This view is known as the most extreme form of determinism; hard determinism. A hard determinist would believe there is no free will it’s an illusion everything is determined. Everything happens because of physical laws, which govern the universe. Whether or not we do well in life is far beyond our control. We may seem to have a choice but in reality we don’t. We shouldn’t blame people or praise people it wasn’t their choice. We are helpless and blind from start to finish. We don’t have any moral responsibilities. Some causes that are put forth by determinist are human nature; which means people are born with basic instincts that influence how they act. Another is environmental influence, which simply means people are shaped by their environment conditioned by their experience to be the kind of people they are. Also, social dynamics, which mean’s social creatures that are influenced by social force around them and psychological forces, which is people, are governed by psychological forces.
Hard determinism argues that all events are caused. Hard determinists define human thoughts and actions as events. If human thoughts and actions are events, then they must be caused. If every human thought and action is caused, then humans do not have the ability to choose their own thoughts and actions because they are entirely dependent on prior causes. If this is the case, there can be no such thing as free will.
Do humans have freewill to decide what can what they can choose to do, or are they dictated by external forces the moment they come into existence and do have freewill? A question that many people wonder about, and tries to find ways to answer it in a few different ways, for instance following the determinism stance where humans have no free will, with their lives being dictated by an external force. While in contrast people who believe in libertarianism, by having a stance that shows humans to have freewill without any choice being influenced by an external force. However, soft determinism, or Compatibilism is stance that people take to allow free will to coexist with external forces guiding individuals, but not to an uncontrollable state. Soft determinism allows for humans to have freewill, while not totally following an unknown, or external force, as humans are the main cause for their actions, while those actions are still influences by some means, and that
According to this theory, if determinism is correct, based any individuals past and prior experiences there is only one future that is possible for that particular individual. There are two different types of determinism: Hard determinism and Soft determinism. Both types of determinism have the same principles; that every action that happens in an individual’s life is determined on a physical level and that all life events are determined by previous life events.
Determinism is the theory that everything is caused by antecedent conditions, and such things cannot be other than how they are. Though no theory concerning this issue has been entirely successful, many theories present alternatives as to how it can be approached. Two of the most basic metaphysical theories concerning freedom and determinism are soft determinism and hard determinism.
The problem of free will and determinism is a mystery about what human beings are able to do. The best way to describe it is to think of the alternatives taken into consideration when someone is deciding what to do, as being parts of various “alternative features” (Van-Inwagen). Robert Kane argues for a new version of libertarianism with an indeterminist element. He believes that deeper freedom is not an illusion. Derk Pereboom takes an agnostic approach about causal determinism and sees himself as a hard incompatibilist. I will argue against Kane and for Pereboom, because I believe that Kane struggles to present an argument that is compatible with the latest scientific views of the world.
Imagine starting your day and not having a clue of what to do, but you begin to list the different options and routes you can take to eventually get from point A to point B. In choosing from that list, there coins the term “free will”. Free will is our ability to make decisions not caused by external factors or any other impediments that can stop us to do so. Being part of the human species, we would like to believe that we have “freedom from causation” because it is part of our human nature to believe that we are independent entities and our thoughts are produced from inside of us, on our own. At the other end of the spectrum, there is determinism. Determinism explains that all of our actions are already determined by certain external causes
In relation to internal and external constraints, there is a theory called determinism which, according to John Chaffee is “The view that every event, including human actions is brought about by previous events in accordance with universal causal laws that govern the world. Human freedom is an illusion” (P. 159). Digging deeper into determinism, we find hard determinism, which is a belief that there is absolutely no free will without a trace of doubt and everything that happens is in accordance with a cause. On the surface it may seem that hard determinism and internal/external constraints have no difference and that both beliefs are exactly the same, however, there is one obscure difference that some individuals may miss and to put it in a hypothetical situation, an individual is walking in an alley and a mugger comes and robs the individual at gunpoint, the individual is still free even with this external force present, however, the individual’s options are limited to either fighting back or being in compliance with the criminal’s demands, however, with a hard deterministic belief the individual would have had no options and would have had to do what the criminal had asked of them, ultimately leaving the individual with
Therefore we are not free to act as we wish due to our actions being
“The determinist view of human freedom is typically based off of the scientific model of the physical universe” (Chaffee, 2013, p. 176). They believe that since events in the physical universe as well as the biological realm consistently display casual connections, and because humans are a part of the physical universe and biological realm, it is a reasonable assumption that all of our actions (and the choices that initiated the actions) are also casually determined, eliminating the possibility of free choice ( Chaffee...
You discussed Spinoza and his belief in a deterministic view of our freedom, and Leibniz’s soft determinism. Spinoza believes in hard determinism, where we have no free will. You argue that since we are controlled by God, we make no mistakes, and thus all our beliefs are true (Marcus, U5 Notes, 3). Further, our ideas only come from God’s perspective, meaning that we should just accept things for how they are, and focus our efforts into ideas that have no source of confusion, rather than address questions on less straight-forward concepts. You argue that freedom, therefore, is based on how much of what you believe is considered adequate. Does this really define freedom though? According to Leibniz, there is another way to approach this. What we think is us believing that we desire something is just a collection of external factors
Freedom, or the concept of free will seems to be an elusive theory, yet many of us believe in it implicitly. On the opposite end of the spectrum of philosophical theories regarding freedom is determinism, which poses a direct threat to human free will. If outside forces of which I have no control over influence everything I do throughout my life, I cannot say I am a free agent and the author of my own actions. Since I have neither the power to change the laws of nature, nor to change the past, I am unable to attribute freedom of choice to myself. However, understanding the meaning of free will is necessary in order to decide whether or not it exists (Orloff, 2002).
If there is no room for choice or chance then everything happens without an individuals responsibility of doing something, mean that people can not be held to their actions, because individuals are not able to chose their actions no matter how virtuous or viscous they may be, as all their actions are all already predetermined. The idea of hard determinism refutes the idea of if-then statements because human choices and actions are not taken into factor because under hard determinism humans are not responsible for our actions. Hard determinism received its greatest influence from the physicist Isaac Newton, and his studies in physics and his idea of the universe as “matter in motion”. People who believe in Newton’s “matter in motion” theory who also believe in hard determinism applied the idea to everything in the universe, that everything is just matter in motion including humans, who need to obey the laws of nature just as anything else needs