Question

What is determinism? Can determinism be real? If determinism is real, can we have free will? If so, how do societal norms influence free will? Remember to fully explain and apply course material with educational support for consideration of credit.

As you answer these questions, think about the nature versus nurture debate. If people are born with traits, does culture impact the development of the person? If people are born with traits, do they have free will to choose differently? How does culture impact how a person behaves or community functions given inborn characteristics?

Answer 1

• Determinism, in philosophy, theory that all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes. Determinism is usually understood to preclude free will because it entails that humans cannot act otherwise than they do. The theory holds that the universe is utterly rational because complete knowledge of any given situation assures that unerring knowledge of its future is also possible.
• Determinism is not just causality. Determinism goes far beyond causality, and certainly much farther than psychological science requires.
• Determinism is a belief in the inevitability of causation. Everything that happens is the only possible thing that could happen. The chains and networks of causes are so powerful and inexorable that every outcome is inevitable.
• We are already locked in to everything else that is going to happen in the entire future of the universe. If you knew all the causal principles and had enough information about the present, you could predict the future with 100% accuracy. The universe resembles a giant machine, grinding alone exactly as it must inevitably continue to do, following rigid rules. That is determinism.
• Free will is the idea that we are able to have some choice in how we act and assumes that we are free to choose our behavior, in other words we are self determined.For example, people can make a free choice as to whether to commit a crime or not (unless they are a child or they are insane). This does not mean that behavior is random, but we are free from the causal influences of past events. According to freewill a person is responsible for their own actions.
• Philosophers have debated both the truth of determinism, and the truth of free will. This creates the four possible positions in the figure. Compatibilism refers to the view that free will is, in some sense, compatible with determinism. The three incompatibilist positions, on the other hand, deny this possibility. The hard incompatibilists hold that both determinism and free will do not exist, the libertarianists that determinism does not hold, and free will might exist, and the hard determinists that determinism does hold and free will does not exist.
  
• On one hand, if determinism is true, all our actions are predicted and we are assumed not to be free; on the other hand, if determinism is false, our actions are presumed to be random and as such we do not seem free because we had no part in controlling what happened.
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