
Determinism and Free Will
Recently, primatologist Robert Sapolsky at Stanford argued in the book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023) that science left “not a single crack of daylight to shoehorn in free will.” This is an almost Newtonian determinism. It is commonly expressed as that nature, the natural world that is (usually the physical world, with a caveat I’ll get to in a bit) is causally closed. Nothing is caused by anything outside of that natural world. And if there is nothing uncaused in that world, and we are in that world, then our choices are fully caused also.
This isn’t a new debate. Free will and determinism have been debated at least since at least the Stoics in the early centuries of the current era. It was discussed by Augustine in the context of original sin and God’s omnipotence, and a famous debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam set the tone of the Reformation and the difference between free will and determinism, with Luther and later Calvin taking more or less deterministic stances, with God choosing the results, analogous to natural law causing our choices.
But the modern debate comes more recently out of post-theological concerns, and has resolved down mostly to a choice of the determinist position (no free will) and the compatibilist position (free will and causal determinism are compatible). Compatibilism often requires something like the view that our choices are “underdetermined”: that is, no reasons can force our choices entirely.
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