Philosophy Notes On – Determinism And Freedom – For W.B.C.S. Examination.

দর্শনের নোট – নির্ধারণ এবং স্বাধীনতা – WBCS পরীক্ষা।

Determinism, in philosophy, theory that all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes. Determinism is usually understood to preclude free will because it entails that humans cannot act otherwise than they do. The theory holds that the universe is utterly rational because complete knowledge of any given situation assures that unerring knowledge of its future is also possible. Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, in the 18th century framed the classical formulation of this thesis.Continue Reading Philosophy Notes On – Determinism And Freedom – For W.B.C.S. Examination.

For him, the present state of the universe is the effect of its previous state and the cause of the state that follows it. If a mind, at any given moment, could know all of the forces operating in nature and the respective positions of all its components, it would thereby know with certainty the future and the past of every entity, large or small. The Persian poet Omar Khayyam expressed a similar deterministic view of the world in the concluding half of one of his quatrains: “And the first Morning of Creation wrote / What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.”

Indeterminism, on the other hand, is the view that at least some events in the universe have no deterministic cause but occur randomly, or by chance. Exponents of determinism strive to defend their theory as compatible with moral responsibility by saying, for example, that evil results of certain actions can be foreseen, and this in itself imposes moral responsibility and creates a deterrent external cause that can influence actions.

Determinism is the family of theories that takes some class of events to be effects of certain causal sequences or chains, more particularly certain sequences of causal circumstances or causally sufficient conditions. One of these theories, universal determinism, associated with much science and philosophy, concerns the class of all events without exception. Another theory concerns physical events. Determinism in a third and important sense is human determinism. It is the theory that our choices and the many other antecedents of our actions, and the actions themselves, are effects of certain causal sequences. Lesser theories, usually associated with Freud and given no philosophical attention to speak of, concern themselves with particular sorts of conscious or otherwise mental causes of choices and actions, notably early sexual desires.

There are various relations between these four determinisms, depending on how they are additionally characterized. The most important relation, perhaps, is that universal determinism entails human determinism. That is not to say, however, that human determinism cannot be asserted, supported, or proved independently of universal determinism.

It is explicit or implicit in any of the above theories that the events in question are effects as more or less standardly conceived. An effect is an event such that an identical event follows every counterpart of the causal circumstance in question, or an event such that because the circumstance occurred, the event was in a stronger sense necessitated or had to happen (Sosa and Tooley 1993). A theory of our choices and actions, in contrast, that has to do with effects so-called—say, for example, effects conceived as events preceded by merely necessary conditions, or events merely made probable by antecedents—would not ordinarily be taken as a determinism. Indeed, weaker ideas of effects have often enough been introduced by philosophers precisely in order to avoid something else explicit or implicit in determinisms—that they may be inconsistent with or pose a challenge to beliefs in human freedom.

Human Determinism

The first is the formulation of a conceptually adequate theory. Human determinism has traditionally been thought about without reference to the philosophy of mind. Still, an adequate treatment of it must rest on a theory of the mind that is conceptually adequate: clear, consistent, and something like complete. Also, it must surely be that the theory of the mind, perhaps in what it rejects, say a puzzling power of originating choices, should be consonant with the philosophy of mind generally (Priest 1991, Heil 1998, Lowe 2000, Crane 2001).

The second problem with human determinism is its truth, whether or not this is considered in relation to universal determinism. The third problem is what can be called the human consequences for our existence of a human determinism. Is there in fact the consequence that we are not free? The philosophy of determinism and freedom, except in the philosophy of science and philosophical ruminations by scientists, has mainly concerned itself with this problem of consequences.

If these three problems are not the only ones that have been raised about determinism and freedom (Adler 1958), they have become the main ones (Kane 2002; Campbell, O’Rourke, and Shier 2004; Clarke 1995).

The formulation of a conceptually adequate theory is simple in terms of a truly physicalist or materialist philosophy of mind—one that takes conscious or mental events to have only or nothing but physical properties, however additionally conceived. In this case, human determinism becomes part of physical determinism. However, relatively few philosophies of mind are truly physicalist. Anomalous Monism, to mention one, is fairly typical in denying “nothing-but materialism” (Davidson 1980).

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