Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

reverse of this position. Some incompatibalists even think that we can still have moral responsibility for our actions, despite actions being determined. ‘Liberalism’ in regards to free will, suggests that free will is always going to thwart a determinist view. So determinism, according to the liberal view, is a kind of ‘fatalism’ — the theory that deliberation and action are pointless because the future will be the same no matter what we do. (Note that, as well as liberalism in the free will debate, there is also ‘libertarianism’, which is briefly discussed below.)

The older scientific view of determinism — along the lines of Laplace’s demon — assumed a strict cause and effect relationship between events in the universe. (This is what was partly disrupted by Einstein’s relativity — depending on the perspective of an observer, one event might follow another in time, but a changed perspective can result in the same event being preceded by the other.) But there is another aspect of causation that is important for the discussion going forward. All causation is about change. The deterministic view of reality that we have been examining suggests that all changes that we see happening in the world are necessary (in the sense of unavoidable) changes. But it is important to distinguish between what we might call ‘necessary causes’ — things which are unavoidable — and ‘contingent causes’. So there are necessary causes (such as chemical reactions) but there are also contingent causes, where the result of a cause might vary, or a ‘cause’ might produce no effect. Natural laws do not, in themselves, pre-determine what will happen. So a fundamental

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