Causes, Laws, and Free Will: Why Determinism Doesn't Matter by Kadri Vihvelin

Author:Kadri Vihvelin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-08-10T04:00:00+00:00

2. No Present Causes Argument

A common first response to determinism is to think that it means that our deliberation, choices, and efforts make no difference to anything that happens because earlier causes have predetermined or “fixed” our entire future. Whatever happens has already been decided; past causes have robbed the present, including us, of any causal power.

The eighteenth-century hard determinist Baron Holbach articulates this response in a particularly vivid way:

Man, in running over, frequently without his own knowledge, frequently in spite of himself, the route which nature has marked out for him, resembles a swimmer who is obliged to follow the current that carries him along; he believes himself a free agent because he sometimes consents, sometimes does not consent, to glide with the stream, which, notwithstanding, always hurries him forward.11

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