understanding william james' 'dilemma of determinism'

Throughout his paper the Dilemma of Determinism, William James provides his solution to the popular free will problem. He argues that both hard and soft determinism do not provide satisfactory answers to the dilemma, and instead argues for indeterminism.

In order to understand the free will problem, we must first understand what determinism is, specifically Laplacian determinism. Laplacian determinism is the idea that there exists some universal law such that, given the current state of the universe and some other time t (past or future), we can figure out the state of the universe at time t. Thus, because we can calculate the state of the universe at all future times, the universe is predetermined, and the past and future are fixed. The free will question asks: within a universe that obeys Laplacean determinism, can an agent act with free will? Free will is defined here as the idea which states that agents can make meaningful decisions independently of the “fixedness” of the universe.

There are two main types of people who believe in determinism: hard determinists and soft determinists. Hard determinism is the idea that determinism conflicts with freedom, so people do not have free will — they just act in the way that they are predestined to. Soft determinism believes that there is no conflict between determinism and action according to free will, and simultaneously accepts that values of good and evil exist. William James is an indeterminist, specifically a libertarian. Libertarians believe that we can show that people sometimes act freely, and since determinism conflicts with freedom, determinism is false. The idea of indeterminism allows us a world of chance and possibilities, where these possibilities only become disproved (or become impossible) once we reach the time at which those decisions or events occur.

James tells his readers that he will not be providing us a definition of ‘freedom’ in his argument because its meaning has been muddled. However, he does argue that in order for freedom to exist, we need to accept an indeterministic universe: one with the existence of possibilities. One method that we may be able to use, James says, to prove if the universe really is predetermined is science. However, James claims that science cannot tell us anything about whether something is a real possibility or not. It can only tell us about facts or what really happened: “only facts can be proved by other facts.” He says that the difference between determinists and indeterminists is which postulates each of them believe in. Importantly, determinists do not believe in chance while indeterminists do.

James begins his argument by explaining that as humans, we tend to regret some of our actions and think “could we have done otherwise?” We feel as though heinous acts such as murders are immoral, and something different should have occurred in its stead. However, if the universe really is predetermined, regret has no meaning because we really could not have done otherwise and whatever occurred was “foredoomed,” James says. Thus, feelings of regret are useless — so why do we still feel this way? Determinists may say that the regret is valid, because we may have simply wished it was not so that this event was predestined. However, this is a form of pessimism. James says that people who accept pessimism are asking too little of the world, that he makes more demands of the universe than the average pessimist. However, if the pessimist views the world pluralistically (they believe that there are some bad parts and some good parts) and can accept the universe for all its good (despite the bad), James accepts them as an ally to his argument because this is not the deterministic monism James argues against. One way to escape pessimism is to believe that we should never regret, since everything is predetermined. This implies that regret is a theoretic absurdity or an error, which means that the universe is either riddled with error (if we regret) or sin (if we believe that murder should not be regretted and instead, accepted). This seems to lead us right back to pessimism, but there is one more path we can take to explain away these worries about determinism: subjectivism.

Subjectivism hinges on the idea that the world should not be regarded as a place in which the end goal is to make good things happen. Rather, it should be a machine for everyone to realize the meanings of good and evil. Subjectivists believe that what actually happens is of less importance than our feelings about the event. So, the murder that occurred is actually “good” because it serves to educate us about good and evil. In this universe, subjectivists say that only our moral judgment matters, and if everything that occurs serves to benefit our understanding of things, everything can be viewed as good. However, this kind of sentimentality without bounds implores the passive to stay passive, the violent to stay violent, because they need not regret their actions. So, if we want to actually improve the world, we must conduct ourselves objectively and actually do something about it.

James admits that there are not many hard determinists still around, but the remaining soft determinists cannot escape the two “horns” of their ideology: pessimism and subjectivism, both of which are inadequate. Thus, soft determinism is inadequate as a solution to the free will problem.

James expresses these issues in a smaller argument that I will call his instinctual argument. He asks, how can we have the willingness to act a certain way if we do not believe in the concept of good and bad (as hard determinists do). If we accept that there is a conception of the bad (as soft determinists do), how can we perform a bad action without regretting it? Further, how can we regret something without believing that there are possibilities — that we could have done differently? How can we feel disheartened at not achieving our goals if we could not have done any differently? James says the answer to all of these questions is that we cannot. We must believe in chance and possibility because of our feelings of regret and discouragement, and so we must forfeit determinism.

One final question that James entertains is: does the notion of a universe with possibilities, freedom, and chance, imply that there can be no god? If there is a god, we assume that they can always “best” us because of their omnipotence. If they cannot, no god exists. James considers the following scenario: Imagine a novice and expert playing chess. The expert does not know the exact moves that the novice is going to play, but knows all possible moves he can play. Further, the expert also knows how to beat the novice once he does play one of the possible moves. So, the expert is able to win even though the novice has the freedom to choose between the multiple possible moves. In reality, if god is the expert and we are all the novice, the god does not have to know exactly what the free agents will choose in order to maintain omnipotence.