Soft Determinism and its implications

Soft determinism says that humans have freewill if their predestined will is not hindered. It still accepts, like hard determinism, that a moral agents will is 100% caused by determined factors that came before. It has the same conclusion as hard determinism. These are....

• Human ideas of wrong and right are meaningless

• No use for normative ethics

• You cannot blame humans for their actions.

Peter Vardy said that soft determinism is different to hard determinism because it has more freewill. We can use our intellect to see how we are determined.

We can overcome some of these factors with effort, using freewill. They can see that they have been conditioned to be impatient. They can then try to overcome this and gain some freedom. However, they cannot become totally free and control all determined factors.

If it is true that we can control ourselves, then some ideas of right and wrong might have some value. Moral agents can be blamed for their immoral acts and normative ethics (utilitarianism and Divine Command) might be useful as a guide. However, we need to figure out what things are caused and which are not. A line must be drawn. This is the main problem of soft determinism. for example, if someone is testifying in court to having murdered someone. They might say that they were predetermined to do it, and so are wrong. In hard determinism, there would be a clear outcome-they can't be blamed! But in soft determinism, it is not so clear. How do we know that they are telling the truth if we cannot draw the line between what is determined and what is not.