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Essay on Free Will vs. Determinism
There is a core notion of determinism running through all of these historical doctrines that shows why every kind of determinism fatalistic, physical, psychological, theological, and logical has been thought to be a threat to free will. Any event is determined, according to this core notion, just in case there are conditions whose joint occurrence is (logically) sufficient for the occurrence of the event. In other words, it must be the case that, if these determining conditions obtain, then the determined event occurs. Determination is thus a kind of conditional necessity that can be described in a number of ways. In the language of the modal logicians, the determined event will occur in every logically possible world in which the determining conditions also obtain. In more familiar terms, the occurrence of the determined event is inevitable, given the determining conditions.
Historical doctrines of determinism refer to different kinds of determining conditions, but each implies that every event is determined in this general sense. One can therefore easily understand the widespread intuitions that such doctrines pose a threat to free will. If one or another form of determinism were true, there would appear to be conditions necessitating all of an agent's purposes and actions that were beyond the agent's own control and for which the agent was not responsible.
But untutored intuitions are only the first word on a subject as elusive as this one. Many philosophers have argued that, despite intuitions to the contrary, determinism poses no threat to free will, or at least to any free will "worth wanting," as Daniel Dennett (1984) has put it.Some people wonder why worries about determinism persist at all in modern debates about free will, when universal determinism is no longer accepted even in the physical sciences, once the stronghold of determinist thinking......
