Dilemma of determinism

In philosophy the dilemma of determinism historically was posed as a moral quandary, the quandary posed by a belief that 'fate' determines everything, leaving no room for humans to make decisions about their conduct, and if that is so, no room for them to be held responsible for their conduct. A modern version of the quandary does not rely upon 'fate' as determining events, but rather the 'laws of nature' in some form or another and, as before, we have the moral quandary of assigning moral responsibility.

Sometimes the dilemma is cast in a somewhat different manner, suggesting that 'fate' or the 'laws of nature' are not the sole agency for change, but that as an alternative at least some events might simply be random. That does not settle the dilemma, as humans are not responsible for random events any more than those controlled by outside agency. It does complicate the dilemma somewhat by suggesting a dichotomy of explanation, 'fate' or 'randomness', that appears unnecessarily to introduce the added issue of an alternative to 'fate'. Possibly that addition was intended to account for the probabilistic nature of some laws of physics, but if so, it is a poorly phrased way of doing so. A better approach would be to say that the 'laws of nature' determine the statistical probabilities for the occurrence of events, which leaves the moral dilemma intact without postulating a silly false dichotomy.

The older formulation in terms of 'fate' predates the Stoics and their major apologist Chrysippus. In a critique of Chrysippus, Plutarch proposed that responsibility implied humans had a possible influence over events, and the 'possible' necessarily must be able to occur, and cannot be 'possible' if fate denies its occurrence. The conclusion is that if 'fate' exists, then at least it is not invincible. This division into the fated and the unfated persists to this day.

In an address titled The dilemma of determinism in 1884, William James suggested that "A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free‐will controversy". Nonetheless, James went on to argue, just as did Plutarch, that events fall into two groups: the causally determined and the rest.

"I myself believe that all the magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science — our doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest — proceed from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the crude order of our experience. The world has shown itself, to a great extent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality. How much further it will show itself plastic no one can say...If a certain formula for expressing the nature of the world violtates my moral demand, I shall feel as free to to throw it overboard, or at least to doubt it, as if it disappointed my demand of uniformity of sequence...The principle of causality, for example, — what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering a demand that the sequence of events...manifest a deeper kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary juxtaposition which now phenomenally appears?" —William James: The Will to Believe, p. 147

In short, if forced to choose between determinism and morality, James would sacrifice the first.

Steven Pinker also has made a division:

"The faculty with which we ponder the world has no ability to peer inside itself or our other faculties to see what makes them tick.":

—Steven Pinker: How the Mind Works, p. 4

"Science is guaranteed to appear to eat eat away at the will, regardless of what it finds, because the scientific mode of explanation cannot accommodate the mysterious notion of uncaused causation that undermines the will. If scientists wanted to show people had free will, what would they look for? Some random neural event that the rest of the brain amplifies into a signal triggering behavior? But a random event does not fit the concept of free will any more than a lawful one does, and could not serve as the long-sought locus of moral responsibility.

"Either we dispense with all morality as an unscientific superstition, or we find a way to reconcile causation...with responsibility and free will." "Science and morality are separate spheres of reasoning. Only by recognizing them as separate can we have them both."

—Steven Pinker: How the Mind Works, pp. 54 -55

A similar division between the scientific or 'theoretical' explanation of objects and the arena of human decision is proposed by Bok:

"The word 'determined' is here deliberately ambiguous...Theoretical reason is concerned to provide causal explanations of events. If we interpret claims about the ways in which something is determined as theoretical claims, we must interpret 'determined' as 'caused', since causation is the type of determination to which theoretical explanations appeal...the claim that persons are free while objects are not must mean that there is some difference in kind between the causes of our choices and actions and those of the behavior of other objects...As long as we regard ourselves as objects of theoretical reasoning...we will be unable to resolve the problem of freedom of the will."

—Hilary Bok: Freedom and Responsibility, pp.199-203

Such explanations that separate moral responsibility and the intuitive experience of free will from the domain of the 'laws of nature' are not universally accepted. There are philosophers that attempt to leave human decision making within the realm of scientific explanation, but claim that moral responsibility does not actually require the ability to enforce our decisions, which remain determined by natural law. Still others deny that humans have any capacity to make decisions at all, and the impression that we can is simply illusory.