NATURE OF MORALITY

Chapter 1
Determinism
 Determinism

Determinism is a far-reaching term affecting many

areas of concern, that most widely and radically
states that all events in the world are the result of
some previous event, or events.

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 The Problem with Determinism

The world is governed by (or is under the sway of) determinism if and only if,
given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is
fixed as a matter of natural law.

The roots of the notion of determinism surely lie in a very common

philosophical idea: everything can, in principle, be explained, or that everything
that is, has a sufficient reason for being and being as it is, and not otherwise.

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 Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR)
• Gottfried Leibniz- a Christian mathematician and philosopher
who formulates his own version of the cosmological argument which
is the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

• Everything must have a reason or a cause

• Every contigent entity there is a sufficient explanation for why it
exists.
a. Contingent entity- something that doesn’t have to exist
b. Necessary entity- something that must have exist.

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Determinism or indeterminism of various theories

Determinism
The philosophical view that all
events are determined
completely by previously
existing causes.
Indeterminism
The view that at least some
events in the universe have no
deterministic cause but occur
randomly, or by chance.

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 Predictability and Fate

§ Fatalism is the thesis that all events (or in some versions, at

least some events) are destined to occur no matter what we do.
§ Fatalism is therefore clearly separable from determinism, at
least to the extent that one can disentangle mystical forces and
gods' wills and foreknowledge (about specific matters) from the
notion of natural/causal law.
§ Prediction and determinism are also easy to disentangle, barring
certain strong theological commitments.

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Conceptual Issues in
Determinism

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 1. The World

An event E is causally determined if and only if there exists a set of prior

events {A, B, C …} that constitute a (jointly) sufficient cause of E. Then if
all—or even just most—events E that are our human actions are causally
determined, the problem that matters to us, namely the challenge to free
will, is in force. Nothing so global as states of the whole world need be
invoked, nor even a complete determinism that claims all events to be
causally determined.

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 2. The way things are at a time t
Why take the state of the whole world, rather than some (perhaps
very large) region, as our starting point?

One might, intuitively, think that it would be enough to give the

complete state of things on Earth, say, or perhaps in the whole
solar system, at t, to fix what happens thereafter (for a time at
least).

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But in making vivid the “threat” of determinism, we often want to fasten
on the idea of the entire future of the world as being determined. No
matter what the “speed limit” on physical influences is, if we want the
entire future of the world to be determined, then we will have to fix the
state of things over all of space, so as not to miss out something that
could later come in “from outside” to spoil things.

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 3. Thereafter
§ For a wide class of physical theories (i.e., proposed sets of laws of
nature), if they can be viewed as deterministic at all, they can be viewed
as bi-directionally deterministic.
§ Philosophers, while not exactly unaware of this symmetry, tend to ignore
it when thinking of the bearing of determinism on the free will issue. The
reason for this is that we tend to think of the past (and hence, states of
the world in the past) as done, over, fixed and beyond our control.

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 4. Laws of nature

§ In the physical sciences, the assumption that there are fundamental,

exceptionless laws of nature, and that they have some strong sort of
modal force, usually goes unquestioned.
§ The laws of nature are assumed to be pushy explainers.
§ They make things happen in certain ways , and by having this power,
their existence lets us explain why things happen in certain ways.

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 5. Fixed

Determinism requires a world that:

a. has a well-defined state or description, at any
given time; and
b. laws of nature that are true at all places and
times

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The Epistemology of
Determinism

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 1. Laws Again
§ Determinism to be true there have to be some laws of nature.
§ The first hurdle can perhaps be overcome by a combination of
metaphysical argument and appeal to knowledge we already have
of the physical world.
§ Philosophers are currently pursuing this issue actively, in large
part due to the efforts of the anti-laws minority.

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 1. Laws Again
§ The Final Theory of Everything- Hypothetical framework explaining all
known physical phenomena in the universe.
§ Many physicists in the past 60 years or so have been convinced of
determinism's falsity, because they were convinced that :
a) whatever the Final Theory is, it will be some recognizable variant of
the family of quantum mechanical theories; and
b) all quantum mechanical theories are non-deterministic.

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 2. Experience
§ Determinism could perhaps also receive direct support—
confirmation in the sense of probability-raising, not proof—from
experience and experiment.
§ For theories (i.e., potential laws of nature) of the sort we are used
to in physics, it is typically the case that if they are deterministic,
then to the extent that one can perfectly isolate a system and
repeatedly impose identical starting conditions, the subsequent
behavior of the systems should also be identical.

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 2. Experience

§ These cases of repeated, reliable behavior obviously

require some serious ceteris paribus clauses, are never
perfectly identical, and always subject to catastrophic
failure at some point.

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 3. Determinism and Chaos
A deterministic chaotic system has, roughly speaking, two
salient features:
i. the evolution of the system over a long time period
effectively mimics a random or stochastic process—it
lacks predictability or computability in some appropriate
sense;
ii. two systems with nearly identical initial states will have
radically divergent future developments, within a finite
(and typically, short) timespan.
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 3. Determinism and Chaos

§ The usual idealizing assumptions

are made: no friction, perfectly
elastic collisions, no o u t s i d e
influences.

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 4. Metaphysical arguments

§ Metaphysical arguments on this issue are not currently very

popular. But philosophical fashions change at least twice a
century, and grand systemic metaphysics of the Leibnizian sort
might one day come back into favor.
§ for the foreseeable future metaphysical argument may be just
as good a basis on which to discuss determinism's prospects as
any arguments from mathematics or physics.

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Thank you!

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