Soft Determinism

Soft Determinism is the middle ground between Hard Determinism and Libertarianism (the belief in absolute freewill) It is often called compatiblism. It says that the world is preconditioned by casuality but because casuality is random, we need freewill. The term 'soft determinism' was given by William James.

They say that you cannot have fatalism (the belief that everything happens because of fate) and freedom, but you can have freedom with determinism.

Freedom and freewill needs determinism to make sense of everything that would be seemingly random.

Freewill allows the moral agent (you!) to act and control the desire effect or action.

People like Robert Kane and Peter Vardy have supported Soft Determinism because they say that total freewill cannot be achieved because of how complex other things like genes and the environment influences us.

Thomas Hobbes: Internal and External Causes

Hobbes tried to show how soft determinism was different from hard determinism.

He said that there was two types of causes; external and internal causes.

External Causes were the things that a person has no control over that has lead a specific outcome to happen. For example, a flood washing someone's home away such that they were homeless. Usually, these will be things will not be what they wanted to do in the first place.

Internal causes though are the things that are controllable. Often these are also called self-determined actions and are the actions that should be considered free because you have decided it. For example, when you decide to go to see your favourite band playing in a concert. These types of choices are made for themselves. However, hard determinists and soft determinist accept that this can be due to causation (philosophical determinism) conditioning (psychological determinism) and genetics.

Hobbes said that in soft determinism (he called it classical soft determinsm) a moral agent is influenced and determined by internal causes, but not from the external causes.

An example is the student in the hot classroom. They want to take off their blazer. They have been predetermined by the influence of the fact that the classroom is hot. This influence is an internal cause because their tolerance of heat is due to genetics. They can take off their blazer because there is no external agent acting upon them to stop them and force them to do something that they might not want to do.

Hard determinism would be the internal cause of the genetic tolerance (or intolerance in this case) of heat which had given the person the desire to take off their blazer. However there is an external cause of the teacher who is saying that they cannot.

In summary, soft determinism=has an internal cause but no external cause

Hard determinism=external and internal cause.

Ayer

Ayer also supported soft determinism. Because of his work in logical positivism, he wanted to show how soft and hard determinism were different from a language point of view.

When a situation is soft determinist, there is an internal cause but not an external cause. We can use the phrase 'caused'. The moral agent in the previous blazer/hot classroom analogy was 'caused' by their reaction to the heat to take off their blazer.

But because a hard determinist situation has both external and internal causes, then we must used 'force' instead of 'caused', since it is no longer their choice. The moral agent was 'forced' to keep their blazer on.

Ayer said that there is a difference in language between hard and soft determinism.

Hard=external and internal causes 'forcing' an act or an outcome

Soft=internal causes 'causing' something but with no external cause (because there is no external cause stopping them)

He used the analogy of walking across the room.

If he walked across a room because something compelled him to, then it is logical to say that he was forced.

If he chose to walk across a room, he is still being determined and had a cause because all moral agents act on their decision. But he was not forced because there was no external cause acting on him.