Saving Morality: The Implications of Hard Determinism

Hard determinism, the acceptance of determinism and the rejection of libertarian free will, results in some serious consequences for moral responsibility. At its most extreme interpretation a form of moral nihilism arises. ”Without God ... everything is permitted now.”[1] That is, if determinism holds true, then there is no free choice, and without free choice there can be no moral responsibility. By taking hard determinism to its logical conclusion, and evaluating the results of a steadfast adherence to the theory this paper serves to show that moral nihilism is not the inevitable end to morality in a hard determinist framework. Instead morality, if not wholly, at least partially, is capable of being maintained by the hard determinist.

Determinism is the philosophical theory that for every action there exists antecedent conditions from which that action necessarily follows and these conditions are governed entirely by the natural laws of the universe. Hard determinism claims that not only is determinism true, but that it is also wholly incompatible with free will. Hard determinism employs the following physicalist argument as a means of extinguishing the notion of free will:

1. The world, including man, at its most essential level is composed of quanta in motion

(quanta constituting the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction).

2. The motion of these quanta are governed by a set of materialistic principles constituting the physical laws of the universe.

3. All actions are determined by antecedent causes that constitute the laws of the universe acting upon physical entities (quanta).Lawson 2

4. Given the nature of physical entities (quanta) and the laws that govern their behaviour, there is no principle of...

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...om this reduction. Moral rightness and wrongness is an evaluative measure that derives its normative force from the universal moral maxims that underlie such distinctions. To judge something as morally correct for the indeterminist involves an introspective call to some guiding principle, a reference to a categorical imperative as a means of making the correct judgement. For the hard determinist judgements of moral right and wrong simply become judgements of reason, borne of hypothetical imperatives.

Works Cited

[1] Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Brothers Karamazov: A

Novel in Four Parts with Epilogue. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Print.

[2] Kuo, Lenore. ”Hard Determinism and the Moral ’Ought’”. Auslegung 14.1 37-47

[3] Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. p. 71.

Print.