Hard Determinism

Determinism is the theory that says that every thing has been determined in advance. There is no freewill. Causality looks at the world and says that everything has a cause. Similarly, determinism says that there is always a cause. Moral agents (that is, us) have preconditioned (decisions that have been made in advance) and programmed choices. They cannot control them. Freewill is just an illusion. For example just as a train cannot change where it is going but has to follow the path set by the direction the train tracks take it, so we are powerless to change our actions.

We should not praise good deeds because whoever did the act, did not actually choose to do it. Likewise anyone who has done something wrong cannot be blamed because they too did not choose.

Hard determinism (there is strict causality that cannot be changed at all)

Soft determinism (there is a bit of freewill as well as things that are determined)

Libertarianism (Freewill and not determinism)

Religious determinism

PHILOSOPHICAL DETERMINISM: John Locke

Locke came up with a philosophical determinism theory that was based on universal causation. This said that all humans actions and choice have a past cause leading to it. The future is logically fixed and unchangeable.

William James said that this was like an 'iron block universe'. This means that the future must logically be as fixed and unchangeable as the past.

John Locke is famed for the statement 'Freewill is just an illusion'.

People think that they have freewill because they can think before doing an action. But all thoughts are accounted for by the moral agent's ignorance of universal causation. He also said that most people are not intelligient enough to notice this.

Man in the room: A man is inside a room but does not know that it is locked from the outside. He thinks that he is free so chooses to stay. However, he is ignorant of the fact that the door is locked. His 'freewill' is therefore an illusion.

Just as the man is ignorant of the fact that the door is locked, so moral agents have no choice to make because it is just their ignorance of universal causation that gives them the feeling of freewill.

SCIENTIFIC DETERMINISM

As you probably know, Charles Darwin proposed the theory of evolution. August Weismann also said that everything living organism had a genetic formula. He called this 'determinants', This would then be called DNA. DNA shows that humans are preconditioned by their genes. Not only physically, but our behaviour is determined by genes. A moral agent's behaviour is nothing more than just their genetic makeup and cannot be changed.

Daniel Dennett: The theory of genetic fixity states that the genes of parents inevitably determine the characteristics of their children.

Recent research into the link between genes and people with certain addicitons has shown that certain genes will make a person more suscpetible to want to take drugs etc.

from this, we can say that humans are nothing more than genetic robots because we are programmed by our genetics. This idea has also been called 'puppet determinism' because we act on the 'strings' of our DNA.

In 2005, this basis was used when Stephen Mobley attempted to defend his 'choice' to murder a Domino's pizza manager-He said that he had a genetic mutation called the MAOA which is also known as the warrior gene.

PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

Pavlov was a psychologist who did work connected with classical conditioning. Pavlov found that the reaction of a dog to produce saliva was an unconditioned reflex. Pavlov rang a bell every time food was produced. This caused dogs to produce saliva due to its connections with food. Despite Pavlov not producing food when he rang the bell, the dogs would still produce saliva. The upshot was that Pavlov defined conditioning as the subconsious repeating of behaviour to certain conditions.

Watson also did a similar experiment with a baby and rats.

Such experiments concluded that human reactions are just conditioned responses associated with the environmental conditions of one's upbringing. Our responses are preconditioned subconsiously.

Skinner supported this further by saying that we are conditioned to repeat certain actions not because we choose to but because we have been rewarded for it. Therefore, all human reactions come from determinist conditioning.