Indeterminism

“ I myself hold to indeterminism, not because I fail to see the plausibility of the opposite doctrine, but because, if human actions were causeless, what more natural than that man should causelessly believe in their causeless origination? ”

“ For my own part, though, whatever difficulties may beset the philosophy of objective right and wrong, and the indeterminism it seems to imply, determinism, with its alternative of pessimism or romanticism, contains difficulties that are greater still. ”

“ If Indeterminism be true we are forced to believe that although as a consequence of ill-conduct evil feelings may arise with greater frequency, yet they must be wholly ineffective as influencing action. It cannot even be argued that certain motives offer stronger attraction than others to the will, for this in itself would be a form of determinism. ”

“ Indeterminism signifies pure chance; what place could responsibility have in such a scheme? It would make morality uncertain. Determinism is the postulate of morality as well as of science. We may call a volition free that conforms to all the tendencies of one's nature, one that systematizes or co-ordinates our desires and acts. Such freedom lies at the basis of responsibility. Personality, liberty, finality, systematization, responsibility, define the same general fact: the co-ordination, the teleological unity of psychical elements. ”

“ That which precedes the act of the will interests us, ethically, only in so far as it influences the will.
It is a strange assertion, sometimes made, that the consistent Determinist must be a mere spectator of his own and others' lives. As if one could feel no pain or pleasure and no desire to interfere, because one believes life to be subject to law. It is true that theoretical study may weaken practical interest; but Indeterminism is a theory as well as Determinism. ”

“ The self, or the will, of Indeterminism is not the man, not the character at all, but the mere characterless abstraction, which is ‘free,’ because it is indifferent. It has been well called ‘a will which wills nothing.’ [4]
But here we have not to investigate the doctrine, but to bring it into contact with ordinary life. Let us suppose a man of good character, innocent of theoretical reflections. Our apostle of Freedom would assure him of his responsibility, and our plain man would welcome and emphasize the statement. ”

“ It will be our object to show that these rival doctrines of Indeterminism and Determinism, or Necessitarianism, are alike irrational, alike incompatible with what in practice we understand as moral freedom of action, and alike based upon the false assumption that rigid mechanical determination is itself an actual fact, and not a mere postulate of the special physical sciences, valid only so far as it is useful. ”

“ Instead of indeterminism, determinism is now most widely accepted. According to the latter, every act of the will is of necessity determined by the character of the agent and the motives which render the action desirable. ”

“ Hence for our dreams, and for what may seem to be merely physical, we may be accountable. The description in the text, let me remark, applies only to an overt act. ↑ ‘The doctrine of Determinism is a will which wills nothing, which lacks the form of will; the doctrine of Indeterminism is a will which wills nothing, a will with no content.’—Erdmann, Psychologie, sec. 160, note. We shall come to the first part of this statement lower down. ↑ We can not use, as an instance, the prediction of bad actions, i.e. such actions as the man himself considers bad. ”

“ We may indeed shrink from the assertion of an absolute indeterminism, but it is certain that we cannot say what made or determined the character of the first reaction, and that the first establishment of a habit of reaction is a matter of immense difficulty. ”

“ He who disbelieves in every form of indeterminism in respect of judging, regards all judgments under the circumstances in which they were passed as necessary, but he does not{74}—and with indisputable right—regard all of them as on that account true. ”

“ The indeterminist usually admits that in practice, when you know enough of a man’s character and of the influences brought to bear upon him, you can tell with some confidence how he will conduct himself, and that social intercourse, education, and penal legislation would be impossible if you could not. Similarly, the determinist admits that it would be very rash to treat your predictions of human behaviour in practice with absolute confidence, and that the unexpected does frequently happen in human life. ”

“ What I wish to urge is that, even if we admit the most extreme claims of determinism and of correlation of mind and brain, still the consequences inimical to what is worth preserving in free will do not follow. The belief that they follow results, I think, entirely from the assimilation of causes to volitions, and from the notion that causes compel their effects in some sense analogous to that in which a human authority can compel a man to do what he would rather not do. ”

“ Could blind chance constitute order and decorum, and consequently a providence? That wisdom, order, and design should be the production of nonentity, or of chaos, confusion, and old night, is too absurd to deserve a serious confutation, for it supposeth that there may be effects without a cause, viz.: produced by nonentity, or that chaos and confusion could produce the effects of power, wisdom, and goodness. Such absurdities as these we must assent to, or subscribe to the doctrine of a self-existent and providential being. ”

“ So both free-will and determinism have been inveighed against and called absurd, because each, in the eyes of its enemies, has seemed to prevent the 'imputability' of good or bad deeds to their authors. Queer antinomy this! Free-will means novelty, the grafting on to the past of something not involved therein. If our acts were predetermined, if we merely transmitted the push of the whole past, the free-willists say, how could we be praised or blamed for anything? We should be 'agents' only, not 'principals,' and where then would be our precious imputability and responsibility? ”

“ Next to the emphasis upon the testimony of consciousness the Indeterminist lays special stress upon the facts of choice and deliberation. Can we really say, it is asked, that man chooses and deliberates, or even that in any genuine sense he does anything at all, if all his actions are pre-determined by his constitution and environment? If every act of man is determined and man himself a mere stage in the process unending and unbroken, is it not idle to speak of man deliberating on alternatives and choosing that which seems to him best? ”

“ But when these motives, these causes, should not subsist, is not indignation, or if they will, an evil disposition, a legitimate cause, a good and powerful motive, for closely examining the pretensions, for searching into the rights of systems, in whose name so many crimes are perpetrated? Can any man who feels, who thinks, who has any elasticity in his soul, avoid being incensed against austere theories, which are visibly the pretext, undeniably the source, of all those evils, which on every side assail the human race? ”

“ The last finds a cause in our nature. Thoughts and feelings, tendencies, instincts, and impulses arise in us, and in these the origin of the acts of the will is to be sought.
If the will, or a part of it, is not subject to the law of Causality, it stands in relation to the whole personality as something isolated and accidental. The Indeterminist who asserts that Determinism makes man a mere machine, himself makes of him something much meaner, something incoherent and accidental. Ethical judgment is based upon the assumption that my action is mine ”

“ We may, then, freely grant the Indeterminist—what he foolishly assumes is inconsistent with the Deterministic position—that environment may be modified by character, that a man is not the creature of circumstances, if we restrict that word to external circumstances, as is so often done. A man, we will say, allowing for the influence of external circumstances, acts according to his character. ”

“ Shall we strive to make the matter plain, in a single instance, by assigning an efficient cause to an act of the will? If so, whether we escape the mystery or not, we shall certainly plunge into absurdity. We shall embrace a doctrine, which denies the nature of action, and which is necessarily involved in the great absurdity of an infinite series of causes. For my part, I prefer a simple statement of the fact of volition, with its attendant circumstances, how much soever of mystery it may seem to leave around the subject, to any explanation which involves it in absurdity. ”

“ The charge is, again, that Determinism robs{77} praise and blame and responsibility of all meaning, and reduces them to mere verbal expressions which some may mistake for the equivalents of reality, but which clearer thinkers will estimate at their true worth. What is the use of praising or blaming if each one does what heredity, constitution, and environment compels? Why punish a man for being what he is? Why hold him responsible for the expressions of a character provided for him, and for the influence of an environment which he had no part in forming? ”

“ Every change in the external world requires a producing cause; who then can possibly conceive of a volition as existing upon any other terms or conditions! It is this fallacy, this begging of the question, this perpetual declaration that it is self-evident, that has, through a natural illusion of the senses, spread the scheme of necessity far and wide over the minds of men. It is this grand illusion of the senses, or, if you please, of the mind, that has brought “the dictates of reason,” as they have been called, into conflict with the testimony of consciousness. ”

“ Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom. ”

“ In a moral crisis, and with the consciousness of a strong tendency in the direction of what is felt to be wrong, is there no danger of this desire gaining further strength and becoming the predominant feeling by accepting Determinism, causing a weakened sense of responsibility, besides providing a convenient excuse for giving way to the lower instead of the higher? ”

“ It is at this point that Determinism lands one in what is apparently an ethical cul-de-sac. If all that is, is the necessary result of all that has been, if nothing different from what does occur could occur, what is the meaning of the sense of power over circumstances that we possess? ”

“ It might, however, be thought that whatever be the compatibility of theories of punishment or of the activity of the state as a Remorse. moralizing agency with determinism, to reconcile the denial of freedom with a belief in the reality of remorse or penitence will be plainly impossible. Nevertheless there is no tendency on the part of modern determinists to evade the difficulty. They argue with considerable cogency that determinism is very far from affording any ground for believing in the impotence of will. ”

“ Not the least curious aspect of the Free-Will controversy is that those who oppose Determinism base a large part of their argumentation upon the supposed evil consequences that will follow its acceptance. ”

“ He does assert that choice, as the Indeterminist persists in using the term, is a delusion, but otherwise, as will be shown later, he claims that it is only on deterministic lines that choice can have any meaning or ethical significance. ”

“ The rightness or wrongness of an action lies in its consequences. Whether one is of the Utilitarian or other school of morals does not substantially affect the truth of this statement. Action without consequences—assuming its possibility—would have no moral significance whatever. And consequences remain whether we accept or reject Determinism. Determinism cannot alter or regulate the consequences of actions, it can only indicate their causes and their results. ”

“ Alas! are there so few things in the world, about us, most unnatural, and yet most natural in being so? Hear the magistrate or judge admonish the unnatural outcasts of society; unnatural in brutal habits, unnatural in want of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all distinctions between good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice, in recklessness, in contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. ”

“ I do not dwell here upon the disastrous lapse in determinist logic. Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man. ”

“ And occasionally, from the heart of the mechanical routine, there comes evidence that [54] understanding is there—that understanding is possible: that not grossness or obtuseness or selfishness, as in the first hasty verdict, but the deliberate determination not to face the realities is the real motive power which keeps the system from falling into decay. For if the realities be faced, the bottom falls out of the world; and man, naked, shivering, and alone, is suddenly left defenceless, confronting the fire and the darkness. ”

“ For that might be taken as a statement that the contradiction already is present in the mere predicate, before judgment is attempted; and this, if defensible, would be misleading. Error is the qualification of a reality in such a way that in the result it has an inconsistent content, which for that reason is rejected. Where existence has a “what” colliding within itself, there the predication of this “what” is an erroneous judgment. If a reality is self-consistent, and its further determination has introduced discord, there the addition is the mistake, and the reality is unaffected. ”