Coming to Terms with Determinism

In addition to shifting the centre of value, as discussed in my last post, posthumanism shifts the universal centre of potential for progress. Transhumanism extends the human centre, critical posthumanism relocates it to myriad ‘Others’, and theocentric posthumanism relocates it to God. To explain, consider that a key idea of humanism since the classical period, and thereafter the Renaissance, has been that humanity is autonomous of the natural world. During the Enlightenment, this was formalised into a dualism of determinism in the order of the natural world and autonomous free will in the minds of humans, which attributed to humanity the capacity to intervene in and vary the natural order towards progressive change. So, though free will does not guarantee a narrative of progress that would otherwise not develop in history (because that would require additional universal principles harmonising human rationality with the order of the universe and a further explanation of the objective evaluation of any changes as progress) human free will is a necessary condition for such progress as a potential centred on humanity.

As a critical posthumanist alternative, Braidotti (The Posthuman, 2013) attempts to locate the potential for progress in the dynamic, self-organising qualities of all matter. However, the monism that Braidotti prefers, so as to eliminate dichotomies such as that between nature and culture, leaves it unexplained as to how anything but the natural development of things can take place or how any departure from a natural order could ever be evaluated as progress, apart from being judged so subjectively.

The theocentric alternative relies on the notion that the natural order is determined by God, and can be suspended or altered by God, in order to centre the potential for progress in the universe on God and God alone. Given this dependence of the natural order on God, it remains possible for God to guarantee humanity’s progressive development, scientifically and spiritually, and even a future time in which the entropy and injustice attributable to the present order is ameliorated by the inauguration of a new and distinct natural order.

Of course, such a re-centring entails that humanity is without free will, and our behaviour and inner mental life are determined by the physical laws of the natural order just like everything else in the universe. This is consistent with pretty much everything that we have learned through scientific inquiry, but the idea that humans have free will is another one that dies hard. It can be explained, however, that our seemingly intuitive commitment to free will actually arises from multiple conceptual confusions.

The first confusion relates to the meaning of ‘free will’, which actually has at least two distinct senses in the ways that the term is commonly used. The first sense is of the will being an uncaused cause of a person’s actions, with no prior causal factors determining what individuals will themselves to do. The second sense is the human capacity to will a range of actions in any given situation. So, the two different senses concern the causal determination of the will (strong free will) and the possible states of the will (weak free will), respectively. It is only strong free will that is denied by the above claim of divine and physical determinism.

A common argument made to assert strong human free will is that it feels like we experience ourselves exercising strong free will when we make decisions to act, or even to believe some claim over another. However, this experience is adequately explained as that of weak free will. We simply apprehend the different possible states that our will could assume, and the moment of closing off all but one possibility in the process of actually assuming one of the options. To confirm that this is the right sense of free will that we experience, we need only try to imagine what it would be like not to have free will. We can imagine a situation in which we are unable to will something, in the sense that it is no longer possible to assume that state of willing. It just will not eventuate. On the other hand, what would it be like to experience one’s will being determined by some antecedent cause? Once it is clear that this sense of strong free will has nothing to do with our experience of our possibilities for willing, there does not seem to be any other kind of experience that we can imagine to explain what a causally determined state of mind would feel like. In other words, it would feel exactly as it does already, and this means that our ordinary experience provides no evidence for strong free will.

It is also weak free will that people have in mind when they object to determinism with the response that we are not robots or puppets, assuming either that machines do not have an inner mental life or that it is characterised by a lack of experienced possibilities for an artificial will.

Another common argument made in favour of strong free will is that the determinism results in fatalism. Consider the wartime bomb shelter thought experiment. A warning siren is heard and a decision must be made as to whether you should run to the shelter or continue with your work. If the universe is deterministic, then either it is predetermined that you will be killed by a bomb or it is predetermined that you will not be. If the former, then it makes no difference to run to the shelter. If the latter, then it makes no difference to run to the shelter. So, either way, it makes no difference to run to the shelter, and as the same argument can be made for any decision about action, there is never any point to acting. However, our actions do seem to make a difference, so determinism must be wrong. What this argument fails to adequately consider is that, in a deterministic universe, it is not only the outcome of your decision that is determined in advance. Your decision is also predetermined. So, it can still be the case the decision to run to the bomb shelter makes a difference to some feasibly counterfactual outcome. Yet, because your decision is predetermined, the difference the decision makes was one that it was always going to make, thereby ensuring that the outcome of safety is also predetermined.

The most important argument for strong free will, however, is that we are only morally responsible for the outcomes of our actions that we have freely willed. Indeed, there is such a tight connection between concepts of free will and moral responsibility in the minds of those who make this argument that they do not seem to treat them as distinct concepts, in my experience. They clearly are distinct concepts, as a substantive claim is being made about moral responsibility when it is argued that it requires strong free will, and I believe that the tightness of the association prevents interlocutors from realising that there has been a confusion of at least two different senses of ‘responsibility’. I suggest that the concept of responsibility relates to some objective feature about something under consideration, which makes a certain range of responses to it appropriate or correct, in some sense. Different senses of responsibility arise out of the different possible senses of appropriateness or correctness, and in this way, we can distinguish between causal and moral responsibility.

Causal responsibility relates to the question of whether removing some antecedent factor would prevent some consequent outcome from taking place. In interrogating a range of factors as to causal responsibility, the correct response is the one that treats the most causally relevant factor as the most causally relevant factor, as a matter of fact. Moral responsibility, on the other hand, relates to the question of the ethics or morality of any response to some other event or action. In interrogating a range of events or actions as to moral responsibility, the correct response is one meets the responder’s own ethical or moral obligations by punishing or rewarding the behaviour of other persons or things for their failure or success in meeting their ethical or moral obligations.

Once this distinction is made, it can be seen that there is no necessary connection between causal and moral responsibility. It is a contingent connection that depends on the requirements of the moral law. For example, the moral law could provide that a person is not responsible for their actions while experiencing certain kinds of psychosis. This would not change the moral wrongness of their actions, but it would render it morally incorrect for someone sitting in judgement over them to punish them (or reward them) for their crime, and in this sense they are not morally responsible. They remain causally responsible, and the correct response to prevent that person from committing similar crimes would be to restrain them during the period of psychosis, rather than restraining some other random person in the community who is not causally responsible. This is the correct response as a question of fact in treating the offender as the most relevant causal factor, even though there can be no morally correct response of punishing or rewarding the offender due to their transgression of the moral law.

Bringing the discussion back to theological determinism, it is now possible to explain why it is that God’s determination of human action, and the lack of human strong free will, is not inconsistent with human moral responsibility. Despite humans and their wills not being the originating causes of their actions, it is still the content of the moral law that determines whether God is just in responding to human actions and mental states with punishment or reward. Furthermore, as argued in my last post, God’s will is the source of the moral law, so we are morally responsible if God so wills that we are. Thus, there is no inconsistency between a position of divine and physical determinism, and the claim that humanity is morally responsible.

The upshot of all this is that universal and human history is a narrative authored by God. The effectiveness of this analogy is diminished by poststructuralist theories of reading that reduce the authority of the author, and increase the agency of the reader and/or her interpretive community. However, when the narrative is written by an absolutely powerful God, God also controls how readers and/or their interpretive communities interpret the text, so let’s keep the analogy. The text of this analogy is the universe itself, and the characters are real human beings and other sentience creatures. This analogy becomes problematic when we consider the relationship between, say, Shakespeare and Hamlet, and we realise that the author’s relationship with his character is one-sided to the extent of being meaningless in itself. The significant difference comes at the point where the analogy breaks down. Unlike Hamlet, we are not just the characters in the universal narrative, but the readers. Hamlet has no inner mental life through which he experiences and undergoes the subplot of his life. The reader provides a space for Hamlet’s mental life in her own consciousness. We, on the other hand, do experience and undergo the subplots of our lives, and that is what makes all the difference.