Scientific
- Universal causation
- For every physical event there is a physical chain
- Causal chain
- Can be traced back
- Traced foreward to theoretically predict future
- Newton's three laws of motion
- Pierre-Simon Laplace
- If it were possible to know the position and speed of all the paritcles in the universe at any one time, you could know their position in the future
- "We ought to regard the present state of the universe...as the cause of the state that is to follow"
Psychological determinism
Predestination
(To be completed on 10th May 2017)
- Controlled by psychology
- All human behaviour is a by-product of not choice but hereditary, social, cultral and environmental conditions.
- These contitions cause us to act in a certain way which we can't avoid
- Behaivourism
- Classical conditioning: dog and bell
- Operant conditioning
- We learn through rewards and punishments
- B.F. Skinner
- Operant= any 'active behaivour that operates upon the environment to generate consequences' (1953)
- Rat expeiments
- Positive and Negative reinforcements
- Reflective to humans e.g. Gambling
- Ingrained into phychology=unavoidable
- PREDICTABLE
What is it?
Hard Determinism
- Incompatiblist stance
- Causal laws govern everything in the universe, including our human actions.
- For us, our prior causes include genetics and the environment which in turn has also been predetermined- creating a causal chain
- E.G. "warrior gene" which is scientifically known as Monoamine oxidane A is found in psycopaths
- More over, the Mary Bell case illustrates a time where upbringing determined her actions
- Clarence Darrow among others said that these actions are caused by things outside of our control
- "I know that life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes results one way, and sometimes another"
Moral Nihlism
- We are not morally responsible
- Principle of alternative possibilities
- X is morally respinsible for action Y but only if he has, or had alternatives to action Y
- No control over prior causes and could do otherwise
- Involuntary
- We aren't the originating cause
- We have no freedom= no responsibility
John Locke
John Locke gives the example of a man asleep in a locked room who awakes and decides to stay where he is. This is a free decision but in fact he couldn't have done otherise.
"This, then, is evident, That a man is not at liberty to will, or not to will, anything in his power..."- Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)