DETERMINISM

Philosophical questions about determinism involve the nature of the causal structure of the world. Given the occurrence of some factor or factors C that cause an effect E, could E have turned out otherwise than it did? Determinists answer no: In a strictly deterministic world all things happen by necessity, as a direct function of their causal antecedents. Indeterminists hold that E might not have occurred, even with exactly the same initial conditions, because of the possibility of true randomness or free will.

General Forms of Determinism

Early religious versions of determinism were based on the belief that people's lives are supernaturally ordained. As exemplified in the tale of Oedipus, even actions taken to try to avoid what the gods have in store turn out to be the means of sealing that destiny. Predestinarianism, a view held by some Christian sects, states that God controls and foreordains the events of human lives so that it is determined in advance whether one will go to heaven or hell. A related view holds that determinism follows from God's omniscience; if the future is undetermined, God cannot be said to be all-knowing. Modern forms of determinism dispense with supernatural beings and hold that invariable laws of nature fix events.

Determinism sometimes is defined in terms of predictability. The philosopher Karl Popper (1902–1994) called this "scientific" determinism. In a commonly performed thought experiment one imagines a Cartesian demon who knows all the laws of nature and the complete, precise state of the world at some time T; if the world is strictly determined, the demon can use that information to predict any future or past event with any degree of accuracy. Real scientists lack perfect theories and perfect data, and so imperfect prediction in practice does not by itself speak against predictability in principle. (Prediction is still possible in an indeterministic world, but only probabilistically.) Classical Newtonian physics typically is thought to describe a deterministic world—though John Earman (b. 1942) identifies a possible exception) as does relativistic Einsteinian physics.

How is determinism relevant to ethics? Some philosophers argue that if universal determinism is the case, morality is impossible because personal ethical responsibility requires the possibility of free action: One cannot be blamed or praised for doing something if one could not have done otherwise. Such incompatibilists hold that morality requires undetermined free will. Compatibilists argue that morality is possible even in a deterministic world. Some go further and hold that the kind of free will that is essential to morality actually requires determinism. If the world is indeterministic and people's actions result from mere chance, people are no more moral than a flipped coin.

Specific Forms of Determinism

Even if one sets aside such global issues, questions about determinism remain ethically significant at other levels of explanation. Various specific forms of determinism posit one or another causal factor as the driving force of change in human life and can be considered separately.

Is biology destiny? Explaining the social roles and behavior of men and women by reference to their sex, for example, is a common form of biological determinism. To specify further that genes are the ultimate biological determinant is genetic determinism. Are all human behaviors, thoughts, and feelings determined by basic characteristics of human nature and individual past experiences? Psychological determinism was a basic assumption of the psychologist Sigmund Freud's (1856–1939) psychoanalytic theory, which held that nothing that human beings do is ever accidental but instead is the result of the forces of the unconscious. The nature versus nurture debate (e.g., regarding the cause of sexual orientation) often is couched in terms of a choice between biological determinism and social determinism.

Other forms of social determinism include economic determinism: the view that economic forces are the fundamental determinants of social and political change. This thesis commonly is attributed to the political philosophers Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), though their thesis was more focused, stating that the mode of production determines social consciousness. They argued that because the material forces of production are given at a certain stage in history and people have no choice about whether to enter into such relations of production, the broad structure of people's social, political, and intellectual life is set by forces beyond their control.

Technological determinism tries to explain human history in terms of tools and machines. In a classic example a simple advance in cavalry technology—the stirrup—changed military and political history. However, many people consider this to be too narrow a conception, arguing that technology properly includes the entirety of material culture or even nonmaterial technologies such as knowledge and processes. In reaction against this view advocates of cultural determinism or the related view of social constructivism emphasize that technology itself is human-made and carries the imprint of the social and historical circumstances that formed it.

One could extend this list of midlevel determinist theses, with each thesis being distinguished by a claim that some causal factor determines some general, social effect. All such determinist theses come in stronger or weaker versions, depending on the claimed autonomy of the cause. A hard technological determinist, for example, would argue that technology develops by its own internal laws with a one-way effect on social structures, whereas a soft technological determinist would allow that the development and influence of technology could be mediated by other factors.

This issue sometimes is conflated with questions about reduction. Strictly speaking, reduction is the explanation of one thing in terms of another (typically though not necessarily its components) with no implication of exclusivity. However, one sometimes speaks derogatorily of an explanation as being "reductionistic" when a factor is claimed to determine something without acknowledging other causes.

Qualifications

With the accumulation of scientific evidence and the advance of technology it is possible to modify assessments of particular determinist theses. For instance, it is not a foregone conclusion that the world is fully deterministic. Indeed, evidence from quantum mechanics indicates that chance processes are a part of the causal structure of the world. Some ethicists, such as Robert Kane (b. 1938), have argued that quantum indeterminacy is what allows the possibility of human free will. By contrast, evidence from biology, psychology, and cognitive science that reveals causes of behavior, thoughts, and feelings may be taken to weaken the plausibility of free will. Even these very general issues can play a role in discussions of practical ethical matters, such as penal policy.

Midlevel determinist theses may have other ethical implications. For instance, as science identifies some causal factor as a determinant of social change or another ethically salient effect, people acquire (or lose) moral responsibility for such effects to the degree that they can control (or not control) the cause. Thus, to the degree that in (re)making technology people (re)make the world, people bear a responsibility to make ethical choices about what forms of technology to pursue or reject. The philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), for instance, argued that technology dominates all other forms of control and that although people designed machines to free themselves, those machines often determine people's lives for the worse. If this is the case, their value should be reexamined. Similarly, people may have a responsibility to pursue technologies that would improve their lives. The debate over genetic engineering and other biotechnologies involves all these issues. If it is possible to reengineer human nature, should that be done?

The global questions about the relationship between universal determinism, indeterminism, free will, and morality remain paradoxical. However, advances in science and philosophy can help resolve questions about midlevel determinist hypotheses. For instance, one can sort out many issues by moving from a simple two-place parsing of the causal relation C causes E to a four-place analysis: C causes E in situation S, relative to some alternative a (CaSE). This analysis recognizes that there are always multiple causal factors that produce a given effect and places that people choose not to focus on for a particular question—a pragmatic matter—in "situation S." (The specified alternative does not contribute to the effect but provides a baseline against which to measure whether C's effect is positive or negative and to what degree.)

This model makes it clear that no single factor determines an effect by itself and that an effect can have multiple explanations, all equally legitimate and objective, depending on the (pragmatically delimited) situation. For instance, it is reasonable to say that a trait is determined by a gene only if specific environmental factors are taken as given. Thus, the thesis of genetic determinism is seen to be incorrect if it is taken in an exclusive reductionistic sense, though it can be correct in particular cases (that is, if scientific evidence shows that a particular gene causes effect E in a given environmental situation) in the same way that the environment can be said to determine the effect (if science shows that it is an explanatory causal factor of E, given a set genetic situation). This more fine-grained causal analysis allows a more precise assessment of determinist theses and thus a better moral evaluation.

ROBERT T. PENNOCK

SEE ALSO Autonomous Technology;Evolutionary Ethics;Freedom;Free Will.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dennett, Daniel C. (2003). Freedom Evolves. New York: Viking.

Earman, John. (1986). A Primer on Determinism. Dordrecht, The Netherlands, and Boston: D. Reidel.

Libet, Benjamin; Anthony Freeman; and Keith Sutherland, eds. (1999). The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will. Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic.

Kane, Robert. (1996). The Significance of Free Will. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Marcuse, Herbert. (2000). "The Problem of Social Change in the Technological Society." In Towards a Critical Theory of Society: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. 2, ed. Douglas Kellner. New York: Routledge.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. (1948 [1848]). The Communist Manifesto, ed. and annotated by Frederick Engels. New York Labor News Co.

Obhi, Sukhvinder S., and Patrick Haggard. (2004). "Free Will and Free Won't." American Scientist 92(4): 334–341.

Popper, Karl. (1991). The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism. London: Routledge.