When two beliefs contradict each other, the resolution is to reject one or the other. If I were to say that this apple is red and someone else was to say that the same apple was not red, one of the statements should be rejected. It seems quite mundane and of little substance and is hard to deny. However, when two statements of significance seem to contradict, an issue emerges. Determinism and free will are two such statements.
Determinism states that every event has a cause, reasonable enough. Things become more complicated, though, as we begin to apply determinism to human actions. Every human action has a cause, and that cause have another cause. Continue this trend and everyone of our actions was caused by something that happened long before we were born. Our actions are caused by chemical reactions in our brain. These chemical reactions are measureable with physics (although we aren’t at that level yet). If we can measure the causes, we can effectively predict the effects. This is a momentous yet scary realization. If human behaviour were predictable, we would have no free will (as the chemical reaction in our brains would dictate our actions as predicted by physics).
Our problem is painfully obvious now. It seems like we either have to reject free will, and along with it morality and personal aspirations, or we have to reject science, the studies that we have come to believe unequivocally over time. To make a crude analogy of the situation, it’s like I have two diseases in each my arm fighting against each other and I have to decide which arm do I want to amputate to save my life. Whether we choose to reject free will or determinism, it would damage our general ideology and beliefs greatly.
We need a way out, we need to somehow keep both arms while still staying alive. We need to somehow reject neither determinism nor free will while keeping them non-contradictory. That way out is soft determinism. The goal of soft determinism is to somehow make determinism and free will compatible. Ascertaining whether soft determinism does solve the contradiction will be the focus of this paper.
To analyze a contradiction, it is prudent to define the two propositions further. Determinism is decidedly true. Every event does have a cause. We can imagine uncaused events, such as my cat randomly starting to play a perfectly executed rendition of Fur Elise, but such uncaused events do not happen in reality. There is no leeway to redefine what determinism is, but there is plenty of room to define “free”.
To reiterate, determinism means every event has a cause. Since we initially assumed that free will contradicts it, we are in essence defining free will as the opposite of determinism. We are defining a free action as an uncaused action. This initial definition of a free action is problematic. The whole purpose of having free will and free actions is to give our choices meaning and have people be accountable for their actions. Imagine if a flower just started growing on my head. I did not choose for such a thing to happen, I have no idea how it happened, no one did anything to me, there is no scientific explanation. It is just a random, uncaused event. Was it a free decision of mine to have a flower on my head? Certainly not. It is just a rather harsh and funny-looking accident to befall me. A free action is assuredly not an uncaused action, an uncaused action actually is never free. This opens up doors, a free action can be caused. In fact, a free action has to be caused (if free actions exist) as uncaused actions are not free.
The actual definition of “free” does not concern the topic of this paper, so we won’t go into depth about how “free” may be defined. We are interested in the contradiction of free will and determinism and how well soft determinism refutes the existence of the contradiction.
We have established that the contradiction between free will and determinism is not necessarily a true contradiction, now we can decide which option is the most sensible to believe, the one or the other ideology of hard determinism or libertarianism, or the compromise that is soft determinism. Regardless of how much progress is made on the subject, there won’t be conclusive evidence until science actually discovers how humans tick (or discovers that it’s impossible to find out, either way).
Human beings having free will is what we intuitively believe and it is with the assumption that we have free will that moral philosophy is discussed. Science has substantially increased standard of living over its history and has aided our species in countless ways. A logical principle called Occam’s Razor states that with multiple explanations, the best course of action is to choose the simplest, easiest solution, provided that both solutions fit equally well. In this case we either accept soft determinism (or a variation, the semantics doesn’t matter) and think that free will and determinism can co-exist with logical consistency, or we accept hard determinism or libertarianism and reject either our natural intuitions of free well or trust in science. I use “equally well” loosely, but there is just a minimal possibility of either solutions having evidence (other than arguments) as support. I also find it very interesting that two solutions that are polar opposites of one another can fit that criteria.