The Implications of Determinism

Roy Weatherford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351786737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The problem of determinism arises in all the major areas of philosophy. The first part of this book, first published in 1991, is a critical and historical exposition of the problem and the most important ideas and arguments which have arisen over the many years of debate. The second part considers the various forms of determinism and the implications that they engender.

Part One

The History of the Problem

CHAPTER I

Introduction

The General Idea

The general idea of determinism is that the future of the world is fixed in one unavoidable pattern. The different forms of determinism invoke different explanations of why and how it is fixed.

The Forms of Determinism

Physical

For the majority of contemporary thinkers, it is physical determinism (also called “causal,” or “scientific,” determinism) that is the version most likely to be a live option. Simply put, physical determinism asserts that natural laws are strictly determinative of future consequences, so that given one initial state of a physical system, at a definite later time there is one and only one outcome possible. Newtonian celestial mechanics are most frequently cited as having this characteristic. Given the current state of the heavens, the next solar eclipse visible in the United States will occur in 2017. It is logically possible that this eclipse could occur in 1999, if either the current position of the moon had been different or the (contingent) laws of nature were otherwise. But in fact, and inevitably, it will be 2017. Physical determinism holds that all physical events, including those involving human beings, have this characteristic of physical inevitability.

Psychological

Psychological determinism restricts itself to the consideration of human beings and their actions. It contends that all our actions are the result of the same kind of genetic and environmental conditioning that compels neurotic and compulsive behavior. In the deep recesses of the unconscious, it is said, are the driving forces that cause one person to succeed, the other to fail. While this is a less inclusive version of determinism, it is to many people more disturbing than physical determinism, because it places the source of our actions within our own psyche, while denying that we are really in control. It conflates all actions with those of the mentally ill.

Theological

God is the central idea in theological determinism. There are two main reasons why the existence of God might be said to guarantee that the future of the world is fixed: (1) God’s decrees, and (2) God’s foreknowledge.

God’s decrees are, of course, sufficiently powerful to settle anything. The essence of Her omnipotence is that God can do anything. Now picture God preparing to create the universe. It has seemed to many philosophers that anything less than a complete specification of every event would be incompatible with God’s Majesty. For suppose that God chose not to decide if my table would be brown or orange: then at least one fact about the world owes nothing to God for its existence. But the entire earth is supposed to praise the Glory of God, so how can my table be left out?

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) went even further. He argued that not only are there good grounds for believing that God’s nature compelled Him (Leibniz’ God was male) to specify each detail about the universe, but we could even be sure that God would inevitably choose to create one and only one world – the one that we do in fact inhabit. Leibniz’ reasoning proceeds from the Principle of Sufficient Reason (“Every thing must have a sufficient reason why it is as it is, and not otherwise”) to the conclusion that we live in the Best of All Possible Worlds. We will see in Chapter V how Leibniz tried to show that God’s detailed creation of this one specific world is nevertheless compatible with human freedom. Many philosophers have thought otherwise. The type of determinism based on God’s decree is commonly called preordination or foreordination.

The other type of theological determinism is based on God’s foreknowledge. The term “predestination” serves ambiguously to refer to both this form and foreordination.

This version of predestination derives from God’s omniscience, rather than Her omnipotence. Let us suppose that a god exists who is sufficiently like the traditional Judeo-Christian conception that She is omniscient. Then God knows everything, including what will happen in the future. Specifically, God knows whether or not I will give in to temptation and knock off work early in order to watch a baseball game. In that case, it is already settled whether or not I will watch the game and God knows how it is settled. She even knows the final score! If this is so, then neither the Red Sox nor I can do anything to change the outcome, which God has already foreseen.

Logical

It is an oddity of language that “logical” determinism is almost exactly “theological” determinism without the God (“theo”). In this version, the determinist invites us to consider the pair of sentences: “The Red Sox win today” and “The Red Sox do not win today.” Since these are contradictories (in the logical sense, going back to Aristotle) exactly one must be true and the other false. Let us suppose the former is true and the latter false. Then it is true that the Red Sox will win today. Then the Red Sox will win today – and nobody can change that fact, because, to a logician, each proposition is either timelessly true or timelessly false. Thus each proposition purporting to describe a future event is either true or false. Imagine that all true propositions concerning the future are collected into a compendium which we will call The Book of the Future. This book would describe entirely and precisely the future history of the universe; it would, in short, be equivalent to what God would know about the future, if God existed. But while no one claims that the book actually exists, the sentences that make it up do exist, at least in part. One of them is in this paragraph: it is either “The Red Sox win today” or “The Red Sox do not win today.” Now it is true that I do not know which of these sentences is true, but logically, one of them must be true. Therefore, either their winning or not is already fixed, and the future is determined.

Special

In addition to the traditional varieties of determinism, there are other specialized ways in which some have argued (or may argue) that certain features of human existence are determined and therefore not under the control of the individual.

Marxism

Marxism, for example, is a form of economic determinism, which is the general position that the broad features of society, many or all aspects of a culture and its institutions, and the attitudes, desires, and perhaps even the actions of all individuals are alike the inevitable result of certain macro-forces of economics. Marxists speak of the means of production and the relations of production, and from these, they believe, they can infer the necessary –inevitable – course of development of a culture.

I have a great deal of respect for economic determinism as a general thesis. I tend to think that the “dialectical” part of dialectical materialism is an accidental hangover of Marx’s Hegelian education, but little of interest turns on that. Certainly, Marx seems justified in his observation that the institutions of an agrarian feudal economy must differ from those of an advanced industrial capitalist economy.

Most of the implications of economic determinism also follow directly from physical determinism: the form of society is inevitable, the actions of individuals are predictable, etc. The prime difference between the theses are: (a) that economic determinism could be true without complete physical determinism being true (if, say, a few micro-particles spontaneously disintegrate but nothing of human interest ever occurs “freely”), and (b) that economic determinism explains the causal force of determinism as flowing through the means of economic relations. This latter focuses our interest on economic relations and their importance in a way other forms of determinism do not. It is, in Terence Horgan’s happy phrase, part of cosmic hermeneutics.¹

Sociobiology

Sociobiology, on the other hand, does for biology what Marxism does for economics: it captures the explanatory force and predictive power of determinism in general and focuses it on the subject matter of one science. If “Biology is destiny” is true, human beings have less ability to control their own lives and their cultural future than we would like to think. Certain roles in society are preordained by our genetic structure and species evolution. Peter van Inwagen has wondered why, when people argue about sociobiology, no one ever seems to adopt the compatibilist position that free will can exist even if our actions are determined:

Perhaps the answer is that the participants in these debates take the idea of biological determinism much more seriously than philosophers are accustomed to take the idea of “universal” and “Laplacian” determinism, and that compatibilism with respect to a given type of determinism is possible only for people who do not take that type of determinism very seriously.²

Cultural

It would be unseemly to write an entire book about free will and determinism without ever making the point that the majority of the people in the world – and especially the majority of women in history – have no need to worry about their metaphysical freedom as they have no power or control over their own lives for straightforward reasons of human oppression and exploitation. To a slave girl in Aristotle’s Athens, tomorrow’s sea-fight may or may not be avoidable, but her duties in the scullery are inevitable.

Up until now, only upper-class white men have had the freedom to worry about whether they were free. Most others find the question answers itself immediately – they’re not free to go to the store and buy paper and pens to write down their answer, and they cannot afford the wine to have a philosophical drinking party and debate it, so clearly they are not free in the sense that is really important to human beings.

Indeterminism

Many philosophers – probably most philosophers – reject determinism. There are, of course, many reasons for this rejection, just as there are many reasons why philosophers have accepted determinism as true.

Randomness

The obvious rejoinder to physical determinism is that physical laws are not deterministic. It is now common for many philosophers to believe that quantum mechanics has disproved determinism once and for all. (In chapters VII and XV we will assess these claims, together with some rather surprising possibilities for indeterminism in Newtonian mechanics.) The usual form of these arguments is that scientists have established that some events in the sub-microscopic world of particle physics are not the inevitable and unique solution to single-valued differential equations, but are the random expression of a probability distribution. The present state, it is said, limits the probability of future outcomes, but does not determine a definite fixed result.

Defenders of determinism have several moves available to them. The simplest is Einstein’s continuing belief that God does not play dice with the universe and therefore there must be a possible physical theory more fundamental than quantum mechanics, which would show how the probability distributions were just approximations to the fully determined events beneath the surface. This response is usually shrugged off as just wishful thinking – no one can reasonably shape a philosophy on the possibility that some future scientist might discover a law of the desired type; we must deal with science as it is, not as it might become.

A second rejoinder is that even if micro-events are undetermined, the same is not true of middle-sized material objects. According to quantum mechanics, each sub-atomic particle in the body I call my table possesses a real and non-zero probability that it might randomly “decide” to move toward my ceiling, despite the force of gravity and its interaction with the other particles in the table. Indeed, there is a non-zero probability that every particle in my table might simultaneously “realize” that possibility of motion, so that the whole damned thing would inexplicably rise up into the air in the absence of any external agent at all. But while this probability is mathematically nonzero for each particle, it is very small for most of them. When you multiply these very small probabilities to get the joint probability that all will act in such an odd fashion, that figure approaches zero so quickly and so closely that such an event would be unlikely to happen even once in billions of repetitions of the universe’s lifetime. But since we are middle-sized material objects, the probability that we will ever do something unexpected, based on quantum mechanics, is about the same as that of the table’s levitation, and if that is not precisely absolute determinism, it is close enough for government work.

Indeterminists have argued that while the randomness of quantum mechanics may be negligible for gross bodily motions, it is not so easily ignored at the level of neural events within the brain. Here there might be enough “slack” in the laws of nature to guarantee that human actions are not the totally fixed events the determinist claims.

But this freedom from determinism has been achieved only by asserting that the motions of our bodies (at least of our brains) are in some irreducible sense random motions. Is this the vaunted human liberty – that it is a matter of chance whether I watch the game today or not? More on this in chapter XVII – for now let us just note that the possibility that our actions are uncaused and random is just as upsetting to many philosophers as the determinism it replaces.

Indeed, Franklin suggests³ that the main argument for determinism is just this dichotomy: “either caused or random.” If human actions are to fall into one or the other, determinists argue, they are only explicable and continuous with the rest of nature in the former category. If our “actions” occur without cause, they are nothing to be proud of, or even to be understood. If they are caused, on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part One The History of the Problem
• Part Two Determinism – So What?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index