Philosophy Café 2, November 2025
Free Will and Determinism
Discussion points
- Do human beings have a free will or are all actions determined by prior causes? Or is the experience of free will just an illusion?
- What are the consequences of giving up on the idea of free will?
- Determinism different from fatalism and the belief that our lives are governed by a pre-set destiny
Predestination associated with mysticism and religious views (e.g. Calvinism).
Omar Khayam Quatrain LI.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
First set of questions:
Is predestination a feeling we experience? A comforting thought in difficult times? Do you believe that what has happened in your life was predetermined? Why? Do religious views among Armenians encourage belief in predestination? Does the history of our people? \
Determinism is a relatively new view associated with the scientific world view that emerged after the Enlightenment and the mechanistic view of the universe (the world is a clockwork)
FATALIST’S SLOGAN: WHATEVER WILL BE WILL BE
DETERMINIST’S SLOGAN: WHATEVER WILL BE IS A CONSEQUENCE OF WHATEVER IS AND WAS
P1. Every event has a determining cause. (The Principle of Causality)
P2. A human action is an event in nature.
(C) So, every human action is causally determined.
IF every human action is causally determined, no human action can be freely chosen because freedom incompatible with causal determinism
Varieties of determinism:
- Social Determinism: The view that our actions and personality are determined by the social and economic conditions of our lives
- Biological Determinism: Our actions and personality are determined by our genetic inheritance
- Environmental Determinism: Our actions and personality are determined by our environment; particularly home environment but also educational and natural environment
- Psychological (Freudian) Determinism: Our actions and personality are determined by the unconscious forces acting upon us
Question set 2.
Is Premise 1 true? Is the mechanistic view of the universe correct? What about quantum mechanics and indeterminism at the micro level?
Is Presumes 2 True? Are human actions like events in the nature world (billiard balls being hit. By a cue) or do they have a special status because of our consciousness?
One answer: Human actions are governed by reasons and are open to demands for justification. They belong to the ‘logical space of reason’. rather than the empirical space of matter. Therefore, they have a normative dimension. Not so for the natural world.
But, is this type of human exceptionalism a sing of delusion and self-deception.
Another question: can freedom of choice be accommodated within a deterministic framework?
Question 3. What does it mean to say that we are free?
- Answer 1. We know that we are free agents by introspection. We self-analyse our inner mental stream and can tell the difference between free and unfree action.But how exactly?
- Answer 2: We can distinguish between our voluntary and involuntary actions.
- Voluntary actions are caused by the choices and decisions we make and hence are free.
- Involuntary actions are caused by outside forces, and hence are not free
There is difference between cases when I chose to do x and cases when I was compelled to do x. My free actions are governed by my choices, and I know they were free, because I know I could have chosen differently.
But what has determined my choices? Have they been determined by prior causes or is that not the point?
Consequences of Determinism
Question 4
Does determinism (and fatalism) mean that we have no responsibility for our actions?
No ethics. No punishment for crime.
No blame but not credit either. Are you happy with this?]