You Can't Wait for Determinism to Happen

Part 2 of correcting misconceptions about determinism

There are a raft of misconceptions about what determinism implies for human agency and life in general. Part 1 of “The Corrections” dealt with control, responsibility, identity, consciousness, and meaning. Here we’ll take up fatalism, rationality, excuses and accountability, novelty, reductionism, and authoritarianism. You very likely will disagree with and find errors in what’s said below so I await your corrections to these corrections. Btw, if you’ve not done so already, do have a look at the first installment for what’s motivating The Good Determinist. Here we go:

Fatalism. One common misconception about determinism is that it’s equivalent to fatalism, the idea that no matter what one does, a certain outcome is destined to happen: your decisions and actions have no effect on what will transpire. For example, if I believe I’m either fated to die in a car accident or not, I might suppose it doesn’t matter how I drive - what will be, will be. Determinism says that since your actions have effects, what you do matters to how things turn out. Driving carefully is associated with lower risk of accidents and death, so it matters whether or not you drive carefully. And this is true even though your driving carefully or not is itself determined, for instance by this very observation about it mattering! You don’t have to be outside the causal stream for your actions to matter and make a difference. And if you were somehow able to intervene in the stream from some uncaused vantage point, you’d have no motivational basis to guide your intervention. As it is, you’re endowed with a strong motivational bias toward living, not dying, and it’s this that causes you to take care, not any libertarian freedom to choose to live. It makes you very sensitive to the causal regularities you’ve gleaned about the world summed up in if-then statements: if I drive recklessly, then my chances of an accident increase. And should there be any indeterminism (causal slack from randomness or a probability distribution) in play as you mentally simulate such possibilities, that obviously won’t help make your deliberations more informed or considered. So don’t hanker after indeterminism.

The conflation of determinism with fatalism might incline people to passivity. If my actions don’t make a difference, then why act at all? The so-called lazy argument suggests we can just wait for our fates to unfold since we are playthings of determinism, not determiners ourselves. But law scholar Stephen J. Morse, a determinist himself, rightly admonishes us that

You cannot just sit quietly and wait for your neurons to fire. You cannot wait for determinism to happen. You must, and will of course, deliberate and act.

So my prediction is that, even if you get convinced about determinism (not likely in my experience), you won’t wait for it to happen. You could try that for a bit, but it will get tedious. That you are determined not to wait (note both senses apply!) given your various needs and desires, isn’t an infringement of your autonomy but an expression of it. And remember: determinism doesn’t mean your actions are pre-determined since they don’t happen until you act.

Excuses and accountability. One of the most acute and widespread worries engendered by determinism is that since all is caused, all is excused. If someone really and truly couldn’t have done other than what he did in the exact situation in which behavior arose, then what happens to praise and blame? If people don’t originate their behavior in some ultimate sense, then how can they be held responsible for their wrongdoings, and why should we reward them for their virtues?

Two basic points make up the reply to this worry. First, it’s clear that even in an entirely deterministic world, we still retain our strong desires for certain basic outcomes, namely the well-being of ourselves and our loved ones. Therefore, we retain strong inclinations to protect ourselves, and to shape and guide behavior in directions we deem proper. So the motives we have for maintaining public safety and a flourishing society are still in place, even though we are fully caused creatures. Second, being motivated in this way means that we have good reasons to hold persons accountable for wrongful, damaging behavior and to reward them for behavior we want encouraged. Such accountability and encouragement are essential to keep behavior within social norms and to create human agents who behave responsibly, considerately, and ethically. The bottom line here is that your being determined to do wrong doesn’t excuse the wrong-doing: determinism isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card, nor does it imply we shouldn’t reward you for doing the right thing. People, after all, are caused to be good or bad, and our responsibility practices are among the causes. That said, an acceptance of determinism (pragmatic, not universal!) might prompt us to reconsider some of those practices as counterproductive, something we’ll consider in later installments.

Rationality. Some suppose that the only way we can be rational creatures, capable of knowing truths about the world and acting effectively using these truths, is by being causally disconnected from nature in some respect. They think there's a conflict between being fully caused and being rational (for examples of this worry see here and here). But if we were causally disconnected from the world in some respect, freely choosing our perceptions, consideration of evidence, thoughts, and practical conclusions, without being determined in choosing them, how would this help us be more rational, or help us better understand reality?

As rather sophisticated cognitive systems, we're very good at modeling the world, and any causal disconnection from the world would worsen, not improve, our ability to model it. Any part of us outside the causal network, anything radically free to choose its response or evaluation, would be uninfluenced by the world, unresponsive to it, and so this part couldn't know anything about the world. There is no conflict between our brains being causally determined in their operations and their being capable of assessing theories and evidence. Indeed, if processes of assessment involved indeterministic elements, that would make them less reliable and rational, not more. So there's no conflict between being determined to have a view of the world and having a truer, more accurate view of it. Daniel Dennett put it this way in his 2012 Erasmus Prize essay, Sometimes a Spin Doctor is Right:

“When the ‘control’ by the environment runs through your well-working perceptual systems and your undeluded brain, it is nothing to dread; in fact, nothing is more desirable than being caused by the things and events around us to generate true beliefs about them that we can then use in modulating our behavior to our advantage!”

Novelty. Some suppose that if all is determined, then nothing new really happens under the sun. But novelty, far from being banned by determinism, is instead pretty much inevitable. Since our cognitive capacities are obviously limited, we are not in a position to predict the future in any detail, determined though it might be. So we necessarily are often surprised by the way events unfold. As philosophers like to put it, the future is "epistemically open" to us, even though it might be causally closed. Furthermore, it is objectively the case that the evolving state of the cosmos produces new configurations of matter and energy, including all human affairs and the very thoughts that arise as you read these words. The fact that all this flows from prior conditions by routes determined by physical, biological, and other natural laws yet to be discovered subtracts nothing from its originality and newness. And if any irreducible indeterminism that might exist in nature contributes to novelty, that’s fine too.

Reductionism. People sometimes suppose that natural law determinism entails what Dennett called greedy reductionism, the idea that higher-level phenomena (minds, persons, beliefs, money, government) can be understood or explained at the physical level, leaving the higher levels with no work to do. But higher-level phenomena such as human persons exhibit properties that can only be understood as outcomes of the complex organization and interaction of more basic constituents and processes at various levels of an integrated hierarchy, not in terms of the constituents and processes considered in themselves. Of course, few take the possibility of greedy reductionism that seriously, except as a straw man to disparage the idea of deterministic causal explanation generally, for instance here and here. They might argue that, because we’re composed of sub-personal biological and computational processes, the person-level causality of character-based reasons, motives and conscious decision-making is somehow invalidated or made irrelevant when explaining behavior. But individuals and their causal powers, including their rational capacities, don't disappear on a deterministic understanding of ourselves. Our behavior qua behavior can’t be usefully explained at the basic physical level, but it’s still amenable to causal explanation at the psychological, agential level: your beliefs and desires are the explanatorily ineliminable determinants of your behavior, which then has its own effects on the world around you. Determinism at that level doesn’t eliminate agency, it supports and explains it.

Authoritarianism. It’s sometimes suggested that determinism helps to justify authoritarian regimes that abrogate human rights and freedoms. But it isn’t clear why, simply because individuals are fully caused to be who they are given their genetic and environmental circumstances, this licenses the state to limit rights and liberties such as free speech, political participation, religious affiliation, or access to education and information. It isn’t as if determinism erases the desire for such liberties or contradicts the ethical injunction to maximize human flourishing, not impede it. That we don’t have contra-causal free will doesn’t undercut the central human values of having a wide latitude of free action and opportunities for self-realization.

Understanding that we are not free from causes and influences, including those of a political regime, certainly highlights the fact that we can be controlled by policies and propaganda designed to benefit the few, not the many. But it in no way justifies exerting control to such ends. And any quasi-deterministic claims to the historical inevitability of certain social arrangements, ala Marxism, have no good empirical basis. Even if such inevitability were in the cards, it wouldn’t establish those social arrangements as good or ideal. That would be a blatant instance of the naturalistic fallacy: that what human nature and culture serve up is necessarily good. And if (as I’ve never heard happening) a political leader claims they couldn’t have done otherwise but be authoritarian, that in no way justifies their actions. To think so conflates the descriptive context of causal explanation with the normative context of ethical justification: explanations don’t excuse or justify (see above on excuses and accountability).

Ironically, the belief that we are libertarian agents, in some crucial respect free from influence, can work to protect laissez-faire regimes from criticism: don’t blame their policies and political arrangements for your misfortunes - you could have succeeded whatever your circumstances had you only pulled harder on your bootstraps. As B.F. Skinner pointed out in Beyond Freedom and Dignity other works, the ideology of libertarian free will can be used as a tool of social control: if you can be convinced to blame yourself, not the state, for your bad fortune, you’re less likely to question the status quo of bad laws and policies. Alerting folks to the reality that they don’t have such metaphysical freedom is thus a bit of progressive political enlightenment. Don’t let the powers-that-be argue that people can simply rise above their circumstances, so that it doesn’t matter if laws and policies seem to limit opportunities for human flourishing. Social policy and political arrangements are powerful determinants of flourishing, so it matters that they be optimized to promote it, not limit it. All told, a deterministic outlook does nothing to justify repressive regimes, and it falsifies the libertarian rationale for laissez-faire.

This finishes, for now, our necessarily incomplete survey of misconceptions about determinism and their corrections. There are no doubt more to be discovered, and more to say about each of them, but your patience has been sufficiently tried. We’re now getting closer to describing what I think are the manifest positives of taking a cause-and-effect view of ourselves. That view gets expressed in the ordinary language of determinism, not usually noticed as such, but worth pointing out. And there’s also the very interesting question of why most folks think they somehow transcend cause and effect when making decisions. The everyday psychology of agency doesn’t seem friendly to determinism, so it’s worth investigating why that is as a step toward becoming a good determinist.