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Free to Choose?
Some people believe that our lives are controlled by
external influences. These influences govern our lives
to the tiniest degree:

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We've got stars directing our

fate
And we're praying its not too
late

The Stars and Planets affect our lives Horoscopes and

Millennium (Robbie Williams)
Fortune Tellers enable us to make predictions about
what is to happen to us.
We are controlled by our genes (see the essay on Biological Determinism on the RE
Website) they control our intelligence, our health, and restrict our choices. Insurance
Companies want access to genetic test information because they claim that they will be able
to make more accurate assessments for their clients life insurance policies.
We are controlled by our upbringing our parents inculcate us with our values, beliefs and
attitudes. We are a product of that upbringing.
We are affected by the way that society controls our lives. We are restricted by the values
that society imposes on us.

The Scientific World is determinist. Science relies on the predictability of the natural
world without this predictability, science can know nothing:

We want to know the boiling point of

water.
We design an experiment that tests
the boiling point using a
thermometer.
o

We find that the water boils at 100 C.

We carry out the experiment a few
more times, just to make sure of the
result.

Science uses a series of observable events to arrive at an inductive conclusion. This

conclusion forms a prediction of future events, and requires that the Universe works to
predictable and uniform principles.
Scientific knowledge is therefore based on a series of experiments leading to a
conclusion. To deny this conclusion would be intellectually dishonest because the
evidence is compelling.



  
 

David Hume : An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

When we have lived any time, and have been accustomed to the uniformity of nature, we
acquire a general habit, by which we always transfer the known to the unknown, and
conceive the latter to resemble the former. By means of this general habitual principle, we
regard even one experiment as the foundation of reasoning, and expect a similar event
with some degree of certainty, where the experiment has been made accurately, and free
from all foreign circumstances. It is therefore considered as a matter of great importance to
observe the consequences of things; and as one man may very much surpass another in
attention and memory and observation, this will make a very great difference in their
reasoning.
http://eserver.org/18th/hume-enquiry.html

Even when science is unable to explain a phenomenon (such as the appearance of

apparently random particles which switch in and out of existence with no apparent
cause) it is assumed that an explanation will be found eventually. Some scientists
believe that a complete knowledge of the universe is possible, making it possible to
predict every single phenomenon.
Consider our use of the word accident:accident L accident- pres. ppl stem of accidere happen, f. ad AC- + cadere to fall: see ENT.] I A thing that happens. 1 An event. obs. in gen. sense. b An event that is without
apparent cause or unexpected; an unfortunate event, esp. one causing injury or damage.
2 Chance, fortune. 3 Med. An unfavourable symptom. 4 A casual appearance or effect.
LME-M18. 5 An irregularity in the landscape.
Science would argue that accidents never happen events are a chain of causes and events,
with each event forming the cause of a new event.
A road accident is not an event without apparent cause it is the cause of some sort of
failure, whether human or mechanical.
We tend to use the word Accident to refer to something unexpected.

Newtonian Mechanics

Newton's Laws of Motion, three laws of motion, which are fundamental to the
understanding of classical mechanics. The first law states that every body continues in a state of
rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless it is acted upon by an external force. This law is
also known as the principle of inertia and provides a description of the absence of force, since
any deviation from rest or straight-line motion must mean that a force is acting on the body. The
second law states that the rate of change of momentum of a body is proportional to the applied
force and acts in the same direction. If the mass of the body remains constant this law equates
force F with the product of mass m and acceleration a, according to the equation F = ma. It thus
provides a definition of force. The third law states that for every applied force, or action, there is
an equal force, or reaction, which acts in the opposite direction; concisely expressed action and
reaction are equal and opposite.1

Every event has a previous cause every event becomes a cause for a new event.
See notes on Causation and the Cosmological Argument.

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Sociological Determinism
In November 1993 Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were convicted of the abduction, torture
and murder of three year old Jamie Bulger. The 10-year-old truants abducted the little boy from
the Strand shopping centre, in Bootle, and lured him to a railway line before leaving his battered
body on the track. During the trial, details of the boys disfunctional upbringing came to light.
Because the defendants were 10 years old, special legal arrangements applied.
Are 10 year olds morally responsible for their actions?
If a child is brought up knowing only violence, foul language and selfish adult behaviour, can
they be held responsible for their own violent behaviour?
Thompson was a member of what can only be described as a terribly dysfunctional family.
The fifth of seven children, he proved as difficult to his mother as the rest of her progeny.
Ann Thompson had been deserted by her husband five years before the killing of Jamie
Bulger, and in the week after he left the family home burned down in an accidental fire. Left
on her own, Thompson sought consolation in drink and was often to be found in the bar in
Higson' s Top House rather than looking after the children in her chaotic home.
There it was bedlam. The author Blake Morrison obtained notes from an NSPCC case
conference on the Thompson family. "The Thompson report is a series of violent incidents,"
he reported, "none of them in itself enough to justify the kids being taken into care but the
sum of them appalling. The boys, it' s said, grew up ' afraid of each other' . They bit,
hammered, battered, tortured each other."
The report is full of violent instances, with details of such incidents as Ann taking her third
son Philip to the police station after he had threatened his older brother Ian with a knife.
Ian, aged 15, subsequently asked to be taken into care and when he was returned home he
tried to kill himself by overdosing on painkillers. The notes record that Ann and Philip had
also previously taken overdoses.
Wednesday November 1, 2000
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bulger/article/0,2763,390729,00.html

It is easy enough to argue for diminished responsibility when speaking of children, or

of psychiatric patients who have run amok with machetes or samurai swords. Such
people cannot be held responsible for their moral actions.
In 1924, two teenagers (Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb ) were tried for the murder
of a 14 year old in Chicago. They were defended by the famous lawyer Clarence
Darrow, who argued against the boys being given the Death Penalty. The boys had
been brought up in privileged circumstances, and the crime was rooted in their feelings
of superiority over the rest of society. Darrow argued that they were so much a product
of their upbringing that they could not be held responsible for their actions he argued
that they should be locked up to protect society, but not executed as responsible for
their crimes.
Is Dickey Loeb to blame because out of the infinite forces that conspired to form him, the
infinite forces that were at work producing him ages before he was born, that because out
of these infinite combinations he was born with out it? If he is, then there should be a new
definition for justice. Is he to blame for what he did not have and never had? Is he to blame
that his machine is imperfect? Who is to blame? I do not know. I have never in my life
been interested so much in fixing blame as I have in relieving people from blame. I am not
wise enough to fix it. I know that somewhere in the past that entered into him something
missed. It may be defective nerves. It may be a defective heart or liver. It may be defective



  
 
endocrine glands. I know it is something. I know that nothing happens in this world without
a cause.
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/leoploeb/cause.htm

This strong view of Determinism is known as Hard Determinism. It has been

criticised because it argues for a system in which there is no moral responsibility. It
leaves Human Beings without the one quality that is believed to mark Humans out as
separate from the rest of the Animal World namely the ability to make Moral Choice.
Blame can be passed back through an endless chain of causes and effects.
Some philosophers use the idea of Contingent and Necessary Statements to argue
against the Hard Determinists.
Necessary Statements
The statement must be true by definition:
All bachelors are men

Contingent Statements
The statements truth depends on a
particular state of affairs:
All men are bachelors

The Determinist argument relies on the premise that past causes lead to future events
this is made as a Necessary Statement. However, it is a Contingent statement because
those past causes may do not have to cause the future events.

Hard Determinism also relies on a perfectly predictable universe. Current work in

Quantum Mechanics (the Physics of very small things) suggests that the Universe is
rather more chaotic than science likes to make out!
Soft Determinism
This is a compromise position (see Compatibilism).

Some of our actions arise from genetic conditioning, or from society or upbringing.
These past causes combine to form a complex web of events which combine to produce a
situation in which a person has some choice within the parameters set for them.

While a compromise might well be an appropriate resolution of the Determinism/Free

Will debate, the Soft Determinists (or Compatibilists) still have to define the parameters
within which human free choice can be made. Because the web is so complex, it is
difficult to establish exactly what is determined by prior events and circumstances, and
what is available to choice.