Determinism

Determinism is the thesis that historical processes occur following scientific laws that ensure that all constituent events and states of the world are necessary and inevitable. Every event is caused by a previous event, all the way back to the Big Bang at the start of the universe. The way things are now could not have been otherwise.

The deterministic thesis is developed in various ways, but the important aspect for the consideration of power is how this affects our attitudes toward agency: that is, how it affects the power of individuals to influence the world. If everything is caused, then everything I do is caused, and I have no independent causal powers. Thus, the correct explanation of any event in which I am involved must include previous events that caused everything I did. Agents can then be dropped from historical explanations.

Such a thesis has obvious implications for theories of freedom and free will because our usual notion of free will is that we do have independent causal powers. When we act, we have choices, and “having choices” means that we could have chosen differently. This has to be a necessary feature of free will and independent human action.

We consider here whether determinism and free will are compatible, and whether, even if determinism is true in some sense, we can still talk about humans having causal powers. A view that suggests both determinism and the meaningfulness of claims that humans have independent causal powers is usually called compatibilism. We note that the determinism versus free will issue is separate from or at least orthogonal to debates about structure and agency. Structure is, to some extent, the sets of social relations of agents acting, so if we act as we do because of structural constraints, we are not discussing determinism in the usual sense. Determinism as it is usually considered would mean that structures are created through historical inevitability just as human agency is so caused. Both agency and structure are caused by past events, so how agents and structure interact will not affect the fundamental causal story. Thus, if determinism is true, then either we have to consider the structure-agency debate otiose or we have to conclude that our compatibilist stance might have little effect, in itself, on our attitude to the relationship between structure and agency.