Predeterminism

• 1. Introduction

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  Predeterminism is the philosophy that every event of history, past, present, and future, has already been decided or is already known. Whether by God, by fate, or by some other force, nothing you do, think, or choose has gone unscripted. Every human action was settled before it was taken.

  That is a provocative claim. It also turns out to be remarkably difficult to nail down. The word itself keeps slipping away from those who try to define it, bleeding into territory already claimed by determinism, by predestination, and by fatalism. Philosophers have debated whether the term adds anything useful to the conversation at all.

  Two thinkers, writing decades apart, tried to cut through the confusion. One wrote under a pseudonym in a journal called Mind. The other misquoted his title and then reached many of the same conclusions. Their arguments take us deep into the puzzle of whether any of us could have done otherwise than we did.

• 2. A Word That Slips Away

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  Predeterminism sits at a crossroads of metaphysics, theology, and the philosophy of free will, and that position is precisely what makes it so hard to define. The term does not merely suggest that all events are determined. It implies that they were determined in advance, deliberately, by a conscious being.

  That logical requirement creates an immediate problem. A secular example from the source illustrates it well: a fetus's future physical and emotional characteristics might be called "predetermined" by heredity, traced through a chain of events stretching back before the fetus was born. But to say those characteristics are "predetermined" implies a conscious being doing the predetermining. Perhaps a genetic scientist examining genomes. Without that observer, the characteristics are simply determined by heredity, not pre-determined. The prefix demands a planner, or at the very least a passive but all-knowing observer.

  Push that logic further and the concept becomes almost indistinguishable from predestination, which asserts that a supremely powerful being has fixed all events and outcomes in the universe in advance. That doctrine is most famous as a cornerstone of Calvinist Christian theology. Fatalism covers similar ground by attributing all events to a vaguer higher power such as fate or destiny. When every interpretation of predeterminism is better captured by one of those existing terms, some philosophers have concluded that predeterminism itself may be awkward, unclear, or even without practical value in serious discussion.

• 3. The Man Behind the Pseudonym

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  R. E. Hobart published a short article in the journal Mind in 1934, and it became one of the definitive statements of both determinism and compatibilism. Hobart was a pseudonym for Dickinson S. Miller, a student of William James who went on to become one of James' closest personal friends and, for some years, a colleague in the Harvard philosophy department.

  Miller's relationship with James was intellectually combative. He criticized the core idea of James' The Will to Believe, which held that religious faith was acceptable even without evidence for or against it. James himself described Miller as "my most penetrating critic and intimate enemy." That closeness did not blunt the disagreement.

  Nearly twenty-five years after James died, Hobart published under his pseudonym. The article was entitled Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It. His compatibilism had predecessors: Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and the nineteenth-century refinements of John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and F. H. Bradley. Hobart distinguished himself from those earlier thinkers by explicitly not endorsing strict logical or physical determinism, and by explicitly endorsing the existence of alternative possibilities, which he allowed could depend on absolute chance.

  He was writing just after the discovery of quantum mechanics and indeterminacy, and he made passing reference to the ancient atomic swerve described by Epicurus. His own words on the matter were careful: "I am not maintaining that determinism is true... it is not here affirmed that there are no small exceptions, no slight undetermined swervings, no ingredient of absolute chance." The article is frequently misquoted as Free Will as Involving Determinism, dropping the word "determination" for "determinism." That single word changes the meaning considerably.

• 4. The Power to Choose Either

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  Hobart's core argument for compatibilism rested on a vision of human deliberation that he considered common sense. He described how a person facing two courses of action weighs the consequences of each, finds one more compelling, and then wills the act that brings it about. In his own words: "I knew that I could choose either. That means that I had the power to choose either."

  That capacity to do otherwise, Hobart argued, is not threatened by determination. He preferred the word "determination" to "determinism," and the preference was deliberate. Determination meant that an agent's reasons, motives, and desires shaped the outcome, which he saw as entirely compatible with genuine choice. The philosophical label "self-determination" had been proposed by others for exactly this idea, to describe actions shaped by an agent's internal states rather than by external compulsion.

  By endorsing alternative possibilities alongside determination, Hobart staked out a position that was more nuanced than the hard determinists who came before him. A person could have done otherwise, he thought, because the causal chain running through their deliberation was not the only chain that could have run. The discovery of indeterminacy at the quantum level gave that intuition some scientific texture, even if Hobart was careful not to lean on it too heavily.

• 5. Philippa Foot's Correction

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  Philippa Foot was one of the philosophers who misquoted Hobart's title. In 1957 she published an article in The Philosophical Review under the heading Free Will As Involving Determinism, dropping his careful word "determination" for the broader term. Despite the misquotation, she shared his wariness toward strict determinism.

  Her article opened by noting that determinism had become widely accepted as compatible with free will. She quoted the general position directly: "The idea that free will can be reconciled with the strictest determinism is now very widely accepted. To say that a man acted freely is, it is often suggested, to say that he was not constrained, or that he could have done otherwise if he had chosen, or something else of that kind; and since these things could be true even if his action was determined it seems that there could be room for free will even within a universe completely subject to causal laws."

  Foot's own contribution was to doubt that ordinary language kept pace with those philosophical claims. When people say an action is "determined" by a person's motives or desires, she argued, they do not necessarily mean that a sufficient causal condition exists for that action. In her words: "In saying that it is determined by his desires we may mean merely that he is doing something that he wants to do, or that he is doing it for the sake of something else that he wants. There is nothing in this to suggest determinism in Russell's sense."

  The Russell she cited was Bertrand Russell, whose statement of causal determinism she quoted directly: "The law of universal causation... may be enunciated as follows:... given the state of the whole universe,... every previous and subsequent event can theoretically be determined." Foot doubted that ordinary claims about motivation carried that sweeping metaphysical weight. She also pushed back against the idea that free will requires indeterminism, criticizing specifically the notion that a person cannot be held responsible for chance actions chosen for no particular reason. That critique put her, like Hobart, in the compatibilist camp, even as she arrived there by a different route.