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Can Determinism Give a Causal Explanation of Intentional Behaviour? Revisiting the Concepts of Determinism, Fatalism and Rational Agency

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Abstract

In this short piece of work, an attempt has been made to revisit the skepticism about free will, which has historically been directed to it due to certain mistaken assumptions about determinism and iron it out. Determinism is often conflated with fatalism, and this is where the skepticism about the possibility of agential autonomy and control begins. If fatalism is true with respect to volitional actions of agents, then there is no point in planning or choice making as fatalism dissolves the idea of control. The main argument proposed in this work consists in showing that even though deterministic causation involves the possibility of a single unique outcome as a necessary consequence of the antecedent conditions and the governing laws of nature, the history of rational behaviour of every agent can be explained within a global deterministic kind of causal framework. If rightly interpreted, it provides a glimpse into how different courses of action remain feasibly open to an agent at a given time. The concept of free will has been outlined first to enable the reader to see later that looking at the doctrine of determinism with the right kind of mindset only reveals its pro-free will nature.

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Notes

  1. By a volitional act or an intentional act, I mean not just a voluntary bodily act, but also a mental act such as an opinion expressed and a choice or a decision made.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Morton (2004). p. 383. The italicized portions are my emphasis.

  4. In fact, van Inwagen suggests that fatalism presents a logical truth: you cannot do anything else than you actually do. He defines fatalism as “the thesis that it is a logical or conceptual truth that no one is able to act otherwise than he in fact does; that the very idea of an agent to whom alternative courses of action are open is self-contradictory.” For further discussion on this point, see van Inwagen, Peter, op. cit., p. 83.

  5. Bernstein, op. cit., p. 66.

  6. ibid., p. 547.

  7. Dennett (2003). p. 56.

  8. Ibid., p. 59.

  9. Ibid., p. 113.

  10. Dennett, op. cit., p. 60.

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Correspondence to Sharmistha Dhar.

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Dhar, S., Sinha, A.C. Can Determinism Give a Causal Explanation of Intentional Behaviour? Revisiting the Concepts of Determinism, Fatalism and Rational Agency. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 32, 79–91 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-015-0006-x

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