Determinism

Determinism is a broad category of philosophy dealing with ‘cause and effect’ and events in your life. What causes the things that happen to you and is there a direct connexion between causes and effects? Do they depend on each other? What all deterministic ideas have in common is that they all believe that cause/effect is real; how far they are willing to take this, though, is what makes the different forms of determinism different. To clear up any possible misunderstanding about ‘cause and effect’ we need a quick explanation.
Essentially what it means is that everything we do has an effect in the world around us – we are a cause. It also means that there has to be a cause for every effect. If you throw a rock into a lake it causes water ripples as an effect. The water could not ripple without a cause, which is the impact of the rock and, initially, your throwing the rock.

Soft determinism is called ‘soft’ because it uses cause/effect to a lesser degree. What this belief argues is that we are free if we are not actually forced to perform an action. We can choose to be a cause, or not. Let's say that you steal someone's car for money. That is an act of free will - nothing forced you to steal the car. But now let's say someone threatened to kill your brother if you did not steal that car for them. That is forced and unfree as although you still had a choice, you did not have a real choice. You rightly decided that your brother’s life was worth more than a car or the chance of being arrested. The event is an effect of the threat if that threat is genuine.
Soft determinism gives you freedom, but there is a problem: it does not completely explain cause-and-effect in the world. The relationship is not as strong as between the rock and the water as it relies on your decisions and choices – you could have gone to the police, for instance and you may have been wrong - what if the ‘threat’ was a joke and you misunderstood? What is at question is just how free any of our acts ever may be.

Hard determinism. This argument claims that cause/effect controls everything, and that there is little freedom in the world. Everything is an effect of some cause over which you have almost no control, causing a chain reaction of events which you can do nothing to alter. Even the smallest action can have a series of unexpected effects. Think of the ‘Butterfly Effect’ – the principle that even the smallest action can cause a cascade of changes. This idea has been explored in a number of movies, usually involving the damage caused by time travel into the past. If you study history, you will see ‘turning points’ – small events that have enormous effects on the future.
When this descending chain of cause-and-effect reactions began varies according to your cosmological view. Hard determinists argue that it started when the universe began with a ‘First Cause’, which can be the Big Bang, a God event or the creation myth of your choice. But they do not necessarily accept that everything is pre-determined, planned out in advance. Changes and variations can occur; different paths are possible.

Fatalism. This idea of a chain reaction of cause/effect starting when time began is also the claim of fatalists, who are hard determinists but who take it to an extreme. They concentrate on the lack of freedom to act. They say that when time started cause/effect began, and so the future was completely planned out at the beginning of time because every action has a prior cause. Every action that I take is pre-determined by a cause and I have no freedom at all. If there was a first cause or act in the far distant past, then every event after that is an effect of that cause and was predictable.
To understand this rather bizarre claim, you have to understand the idea of the non-existence of luck. Let's take the most basic ‘luck-driven’ event; the flipping of a coin. What affects the flipping of a coin? There is the strength of your thumb, the start position, the rate at which the coin turns, the wind, the type of surface it lands on, the height it reaches, and many more. As you can see there are many variables, but if you knew precisely what all of them were, a very powerful computer and the skills to do the job, you could predict which face will be upwards when the coin comes to rest. Now imagine that you were born in another country. You may have no religion now or you may have various beliefs but if you were born in one place, you’d almost certainly be Moslem, in another you’d be Hindu, like your parents. There’d be no choice and that would affect all your beliefs and actions. It seems that belief is merely a matter of geography.

With every event you could trace back to the initial cause if you knew how and you could even predict the future events flowing on from the event as well. This is what we try and do with weather predictions and although we use the most powerful computers built to do it and we are amazingly accurate (oh yes we are – we only remember when they get it wrong) it is still difficult to predict. Fatalism seems to be the only deterministic belief that has no obvious flaws. That is worrying because it implies that we are never responsible for our own actions. How can we punish a criminal when s/he can argue that they had no choice and their actions were pre-determined by a first cause, perhaps God? It wouldn’t be fair would it? We can show no regret, no remorse and no guilt. It wasn’t our fault.
In fact we do not accept that at all as it would make society impossible although we do have a little fatalism in us all. Many of us check our horoscopes every day (how can they have any truth unless things are pre-destined?) and being fatalistic has two advantages. First it allows us to disclaim responsibility for minor things that go wrong or that we do when we know that they are wrong – ‘I couldn’t help myself, I just had to eat it.’ This is the ‘devil made me do it’ defence. Secondly it is often very comforting when we are grieving or when really awful things happen to us to say that we are not in control of events, that this person was doomed in some way or that ‘it’s just the way things are’.

One theory that challenges this is the Theory of Agency. This refuses to accept that everything is pre-destined, not because it is inconvenient but because we are clearly making choices with different effects. It accepts that there are cause/effect relationships but argues that each one of us is an ‘agent’ for change – we have a will, a ‘self’ comprised of our unique knowledge and ideas and that allows us to make free choices. These choices are affected by other events around us but not controlled by them. The effects of our choices are interlocked with other effects from other causes, but we are responsible for our actions. We may rob a store without intending to hurt anyone and the gun goes off accidentally, killing someone. We are responsible for murder because we made the initial choice to act criminally.
This is the basis of many modern philosophies which emphasise free will. A philosophy like Existentialism completely rejects any determinism, arguing that we construct our self and our entire lives by our choices, an act of self creation and that we are entirely responsible for the results.