determinism, in philosophy and science, the thesis that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable. Determinism entails that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.
Determinism in this sense is usually understood to be incompatible with free will, or the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe. Philosophers and scientists who deny the existence of free will on this basis are known as “hard” determinists.
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In contrast, so-called “soft” determinists, also called compatibilists, believe that determinism and free will are compatible after all. In most cases, soft determinists attempt to achieve this reconciliation by subtly revising or weakening the commonsense notion of free will. Contemporary soft determinists have included the English philosopher G.E. Moore (1873–1958), who held that acting freely means only that one would have acted otherwise had one decided to do so (even if, in fact, one could not have decided to do so), and the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who argued that acting freely amounts to identifying with or approving of one’s own desires (even if those desires are such that one cannot help but act on them).
The extreme alternative to determinism is indeterminism, the view that at least some events have no deterministic cause but occur randomly, or by chance. Indeterminism is supported to some extent by research inquantum mechanics, which suggests that some events at the quantum level are in principle unpredictable (and therefore random). Philosophers and scientists who believe that the universe is indeterministic and that humans possess free will are known as “libertarians” (libertarianism in this sense is not to be confused with the school ofpolitical philosophycalledlibertarianism). Although it is possible to hold that the universe is indeterministic and that human actions are nevertheless determined, few contemporary philosophers defend this view.
Libertarianism is vulnerable to what is called the “intelligibility” objection, which points out that people can have no more control over a purely random action than they have over an action that is deterministically inevitable; in neither case does free will enter the picture. Hence, if human actions are indeterministic, free will does not exist.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Brian Duignan.
